


Over the Mountain

by jessie_pie



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Apocalypse, Canon Divergent, Curses, Fallen Castiel, Gen, Human Castiel, Hurt Castiel, Protective Dean, can be read as destiel, hurt/ comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-01
Updated: 2016-02-24
Packaged: 2018-05-17 12:14:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 40,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5869093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessie_pie/pseuds/jessie_pie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first sign of a problem came when Castiel stumbled.</p><p>In moments, Castiel goes from falling to dying, and Sam and Dean have one month to fix it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Drifting Down

The first sign that something was wrong came when Castiel stumbled.

They had just wiped out a demon nest, the latest in God-knew-how-many. Sam had lost count a long time back. Cas had been going nonstop for the past few months, as though determined to burn as many demons as possible before the fires of his grace ultimately failed him. The last time Sam had seen anyone live with such intensity, Dean had had a year left on his deal.

Dean… The thought made Sam uneasy. Midway through the hunt, a she-demon had recognized Dean. “It’s too bad your little freak offed Alistair. You’re a crap replacement. We had high hopes for you, you know? The Righteous Man?” She sneered. “Alistair was an artist. You learned nothing from him; you’re just the same as when you walked in: a butcher.” She had darted in, leaned close to Dean’s ear and whispered something before Dean drove Ruby’s knife into her throat with such force that she was nearly decapitated. Dean had barely spoken during the remainder of the hunt, had driven twenty over the limit on the way back, and now was slamming his door and stomping off to the motel room before Sam could even swing his legs out of the car.

Afterwards, Sam was never able to say if it was sound or the absence of sound that warned him, if it was Cas’s sudden, sharp inhalation or the lack of the heavy thud of the Impala’s door closing. Either way, some instinct flared in him and he spun around to see Castiel, ashen, clutching the Impala’s roof with his right hand, the door with his left, swaying on his feet, eyes wide and unfocused.

Sam ran to the back door of the Impala, catching Cas as he crumpled, his arms wrapped around the angel’s chest, his head lolling awkwardly on his shoulder.

“Dean!” Sam yelled.

His brother, now more than halfway across the parking lot, did not respond.

“DEAN!” Sam yelled again. Louder, more desperately. Cas was like a bag of wet cement. He dug his heels in to try to keep his balance.

Dean, nearly to the motel room door, looked back over his shoulder. For a moment, Sam thought he saw an angry sneer etched on his brother’s face, but the expression vanished as he took in the scene. Sam could just see his brother’s eyes widening, then Dean was running toward the car.

Cas’s eyes flickered open and he weakly raised his head from Sam’s shoulder. He made an effort to stand, but slumped back against Sam, unable to support his own weight.

“Just stay still, ok?” Sam said, rather desperately, as Castiel clutched at the edge of the door.

“What the hell happened?” Dean demanded as he ran up beside them.

“I apologize-” Castiel began hoarsely, but Dean cut him off:

“C’mon, Sam, let’s get him inside.”

  


“What the hell’s going on here?” Dean demanded again once they had deposited Cas on the bed nearest the door. The angel sat slumped, head hanging. His complexion still had an unhealthy grey cast, but he was no longer as deathly pale as he had been outside the Impala.

“I have fallen,” Castiel said flatly.

“We _know_ that,” Dean interrupted.

“-And I have just lost the last of my Grace,” Castiel continued undeterred.

Silence filled the cramped motel room as the brothers stared at him.

Dean was the first to speak.

“I-I thought you had _months_ left,” he said awkwardly, running a hand through his hair.

“My initial estimates were flawed,” Castiel said tersely. His shoulders now rested against the pillows, but his feet were still on the floor, putting his body at a twisted angle that looked horribly uncomfortable.

“Is it… is it _normally_ like that?” Sam asked. Like his brother, he was aware that this was an intensely personal and deeply uncomfortable topic of conversation.

“Angels do not normally discuss falling.” Castiel’s eyes briefly closed, as though it cost too much effort to keep them open. “However, I believe that it is not.”

“Alright, Cas.” Dean was pacing now, though the indentation between the door and the bathroom was barely ten steps long. “What have you been keeping from us?”

“Why would you ask that?” Castiel’s voice was harsh, and there was a sudden aquiline glint in his eye that sent an icy shiver down the back of Sam’s neck. _That presence, that power_ , he realized. _That wasn’t just from his Grace._

“I’m asking because you’re the worst liar I know, and if I think you’re hiding something from me, then you are.” Dean had stopped pacing and stood with his arms crossed, glaring at Castiel.

The ferocity vanished from Castiel’s face, and he looked old and beaten and tired. Sam felt uncomfortable as Dean continued to glare, and was on the cusp of asking him to stop when Castiel spoke.

“I believe I may have been cursed.

“For the past two thousand years, angels have not been generally permitted to interact directly with humans. But there have sometimes been individuals we could not easily ignore. In those cases, we used curses to eliminate the problem. Curses did not require angels to visit Earth, so it was… acceptable.”

“Like, the opposite of ‘guns don’t kill, people do’?” Dean asked.

Castiel frowned. “Yes… I suppose so. It was an attempt by some of Heaven’s higher angels to evade the restrictions they themselves placed on their conduct. I should have seen their hypocrisy long ago.

“I was never personally involved in any of those missions, so I do not have much knowledge about the curse, only that it functions by gradually sapping the life force of its victims. It is, by all accounts, a slow, but not a painful death. Better than many of its recipients deserved.”

“How long?” Dean’s arms were still crossed over his chest, face set in a scowl. “How long does it take?”

“On a human, a few weeks, perhaps a month. It depends on the individual, if they conserve their strength… a variety of factors,” Castiel said. “On an angel? I don’t know. As far as I know, no one has ever done this before.”

“How long have you known about this, Cas?” There was a wild note in Dean’s voice, and desperation burned in his eyes.

Castiel looked down at his lap. “I was not certain until today, but I… have suspected for a few months. My Grace was vanishing faster than I thought it should, and I thought this… could… be the cause.”

“A few months? _A few months?!_ Jesus fucking _Christ_ , Cas, when the hell were you going to tell us?”

“There is an Apocalypse,” Castiel said curtly.

“That is not how things work here, ok? You got a problem, you tell us, we fix it. What you don’t do is go crawl off into a corner to die. Got it?” Dean glared at Sam and Cas in turn as neither of them spoke. Dean uncrossed and crossed his arms, then finally jammed his hands into his pockets, hooking his thumbs through his belt loops. “So how do we beat this thing, anyways?”

Castiel did not raise his eyes. “To the best of my knowledge, no one ever has.”

A rictus grin distorted Dean’s face. “So we call Bobby, then. Guy’s got loads of ideas, tons of experience, books out the wazoo. Anyone knows what to do, it’ll be him.” 

  


“How to break it? No one had even seen an angel until a year ago, and now you’re asking me how to break their curses?” Bobby’s voice made the cell phone on the night stand judder. The two Winchesters huddled around the phone, Dean leaning forward on the edge of the second bed, and Sam crouching in the narrow aisle between the two bedframes. Cas still lay on the bed closest to the door; Sam had persuaded him to move his legs onto the mattress, but he didn’t look any more comfortable.

“Well, how do you break curses normally?” Dean’s voice was tinged with desperation.

“Normally, you’d kill the witch or disrupt her circle, but none of that would work here. Ya can’t kill an angel, and forget about a flock of ‘em; ya don’t have the fire power. And as for disrupting the circle, what do you wanna do, go storm Heaven? Sorry, Dean, but it ain’t gonna happen.”

“Those can’t be the only options.” Dean was begging now.

“Welp-” They could hear heavy pages being turned on the other end of the line. “Some curses have counter-curses, or spells, or blockers. A few people theorize they all do, but I dunno about that.”

“So there’s a ritual?”Dean’s whole attitude shifted, his eyes wide with excitement.

“Might be.” Sam could imagine Bobby, frowning and shrugging his shoulders. “First time I’ve heard of anything like this. I’ll make some calls, I’ll look into it, but I got nothing.

“Cas-” The old hunter’s voice was suddenly husky with emotion. “You know we’ll do everything we can for you, look under every rock if we have to.”

Castiel nodded, eyes closed, face drawn. “Thank you. Your efforts will almost assuredly be futile, but I appreciate them nonetheless.”

“ Everyone who’s underestimated this old codger has wound up regretting it, so you might be eatin’ your words before too long.

“And Dean?” Bobby sounded stern. “Don’t go and do anything stupid. This is Heaven we’re dealing with. We don’t got anything that can touch ‘em directly.

“Sam, you keep an eye on ‘em both for me, alright? I’ll call you soon as I get something.”

Dean picked up the phone, smothering it in his fist and depressing the “End Call” button.

“That’s all we’ve got?” he said incredulously. “That’s all we’ve got?” he repeated, voice rising. “Take a couple aspirin and call me in the morning?

“Son of a bitch!” Dean threw the phone to the carpet. The back flew off and the batteries popped free. “Son of a bitch!”

“Dean,” Sam said. “Calm down. Bobby’s working on it. He’s always come through for us. He’ll find something.”

“Yeah, and we’ve got what? A couple of weeks? A month, tops? For a ritual that might not even exist? That’s just great. Think you could have told us any sooner, Cas?” Dean spat.

Castiel looked uncomfortable. “I thought it was for the best,” he muttered. “I am only one individual, and there are many lives at stake in the Apocalypse.”

“Yeah, well, this isn’t fucking Star Trek,” Dean shot back. He was pacing the tight corner of the room again, this time faster. “I thought we were supposed to be a team, you know? You know what people do when they’re a team? _They freaking work together!_ ” Dean shouted the last sentence loudly enough that the corner rang.

Castiel bit his lower lip and stared at his hands which lay folded in his lap.

“Dean-” Sam started again.

“Don’t,” Dean shook his head. “Just don’t. You know what the worst part of this is?” He looked at Sam and Castiel, but did not pause long enough to let them answer. “Him just sitting there, acting like he doesn’t freaking care.” He looked around wildly, eyes sliding over Sam and Cas as though they were not what he was looking for.

“God damn _motherfucking_ son of a bitch!” Dean roared, slamming his fist into the wall.

In the ringing silence that followed, Dean pulled his bloodied hand out of the drywall, muttered something about going out, and stomped to the door. He shattered the relative quiet again by slamming it so hard the frame rattled.

The Impala’s engine roared as Dean careened out of the parking lot. Sam sighed and leaned his head and forearm against the cool windowpane, wishing he’d done more to stop him. A faint rustling sound behind him as Castiel moved on the bed reminded him he wasn’t alone. “It’s ok, Cas,” he said without turning around. “He’ll be back.”

  


It was after midnight when Dean slunk back into the motel room, dragging his feet and reeking of whiskey. Sam was still awake. He hadn’t expected to get much sleep; every time Dean went on a binge, he was excruciatingly aware of everything that could go wrong, and often had to push images of Dean’s crumpled body lying in the backseat of the Impala out of his head. Still, though, the quiet lulls when no trucks were rolling down the highway gave him a false sense of security and allowed him to slip into an uneasy sleep- at least until the next big engine rumbled by.

He hadn’t taken Cas into consideration, though. He had clearly wanted to sit up until Dean returned. He hadn’t said as much, but his gaze remained fixed on the door until Sam promised again that Dean would come back, that he had done this before, that this was normal. He felt like a liar as he reassured Cas; Dean had always come back, but that did nothing to assuage his own doubts that tonight might be the night when he wouldn’t, Dean was often volatile and angry, but it wasn’t like they left a string of motels with plaster pockmarked by his fist, and Dean had been struck by so many blows, Sam wasn’t sure he could take this one more. Fortunately, Cas was in some ways still very much an angel, unaccustomed to human emotions and longing to take things on faith, so he seemed to believe him. And when Sam encouraged him to sleep, he lay down his head and slept.

But he did not sleep quietly.

A few minutes later, Sam heard Cas mumbling something. “You ok?” he asked, raising his head from the pillow.

Cas said something else, of which only the words “don’t understand” were clear enough for Sam to make out.

“I just asked if you were ok,” Sam repeated, pushing himself out of bed and stumbling across the narrow strip of worn carpet so he was standing by Castiel’s bed. He suddenly felt a bit embarrassed about his sleeping attire, boxers and a t-shirt. It was different than having the space to himself or sharing the room with Dean.

“Not what I was ordered,” Castiel muttered. Sam leaned over him awkwardly, squinting a little in the dark room. Cas’s brow was furrowed, but his eyes were closed and his fist clutched the blanket. Castiel was asleep. Sam hovered a moment more before turning back to his own bed. There was no point in humiliating Cas by discussing incidents and emotions he had never wanted to mention.

If Sam had hoped Cas might stop dreaming and fall silent, he was disappointed. Over the next few hours, Cas spoke, muttered, moaned, whimpered, and, on two occasions, cried out in pain or terror.

So when Dean staggered back into the motel room, Sam was awake and Cas was begging “Why? I tried… follow every order… don’t understand… why have you…”.  
The door clicked shut behind Dean, but he still stood just over the threshold, his silhouette visible in the light that passed through the curtains. He stood lopsided, off balance from the effects of the whiskey.

“He been like this all night?” Dean asked.

“Yeah,” Sam admitted.

“God,” Dean said thickly, staring at the shaking angel. Sam thought he caught a note of sympathy in his tone.

Dean continued standing in the doorway- somewhat awkwardly, Sam thought.

“I can give you a pillow and a blanket,” he offered.

“Thanks, Sammy,” Dean slurred.

As Dean set up an impromptu bed on the floor, Castiel’s terrified babble faded away to deep, quiet breaths.


	2. In The Storm So Long

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was like he could see the earth in its entirety, as though the land cupped by the storm clouds was all that remained of the world. And when it came, that unknown signal, it would be scoured by lightning or baptized by rain, and he knew not which. Sam shuddered, the strange scent of the impending storm filling his nostrils.

  


Dean’s back was stiff from sleeping on the floor, the sun was shining directly in his eyes, and a seemingly endless procession of fire trucks was driving down the road in front of the motel, their wailing sirens amplifying his already pounding headache.

Dean blinked. There wasn’t a convoy of fire trucks; the noise was coming from- his cell phone? Dean swore violently and dug through his pockets- he couldn’t remember falling asleep in his clothes- searching for the source of the brain-splitting racket.

“What?” Dean snapped as he raised the phone to his ear, making sure that that one syllable carried all of his hatred and contempt for the miserable son of a bitch who’d…

“Well, nice to hear from you, too!”

Oh. Bobby Singer.

“What is it? Did you find something?” Dean was suddenly aware of how dry his mouth was, of how his tongue felt coated in foul-flavored cottonwool.

“Maybe. Could be something, at least. Got in touch with a couple of contacts last night. Turns out the University of Dubuque up in Iowa has a real good religious library. Lots of old, esoteric stuff. You’ve at least got a chance of finding something up there.”

“Thanks, Bobby. That’s great. Knew you’d come through for Cas.” Dean hung up the phone before the old hunter had a chance to speak and pushed himself to his feet, ignoring the way his back twinged and his headache made his vision swim. His hangover seemed inconsequential now.

“Whassa ma’er?” Sam’s voice was thick with sleep and his dark hair fell in his eyes.

Dean grinned. “C’mon Sam! Bobby’s got us a lead. Sam, Cas, it’s time to get up. We’re going to Iowa.”

  


Normally, Dean would have driven the nearly seventeen hours from southern Georgia to eastern Iowa in a single day, and normally, Sam would have tolerated it. But Cas looked worn out before they even got out the door, so Sam put his foot down. It took a good deal of arguing, but somewhere around the Tennessee border, Dean conceded, though he spent most of the day complaining that they were wasting time, that they should go full throttle the entire way so they could get to Iowa and sort this mess out. When they stopped in Kentucky for the evening, and Cas emerged from the car trembling from exhaustion, dragging his feet as he trudged to the motel, Dean fell silent.

Cas didn’t stay awake very long once they finished their Chinese take-out, but once again sleep seemed to provide neither rest nor respite. They pretended not to hear as Cas pleaded with unseen tormentors, but once, when Cas called out Dean’s name, their eyes briefly met.

Eventually, exhaustion from the previous night’s sleep deprivation won out, and Sam sank into a shallow sleep. Around two in the morning, though, he sensed something was different. Still more than half asleep, he rolled over onto his side- then realized what had woken him. The room was quiet. The only sound he could hear was Dean’s murmuring voice. Sam opened his eyes, not wide enough to be noticeable, and squinted across the dark motel room.

Dean sat in a chair next to Castiel’s bed. His voice was too soft for Sam to make out anything he was saying, but he recognized the tone. He’d heard it when he was waking from nightmares, when he was badly injured and when he was very young. Sam’s last thought, before sleep reclaimed him and erased all memory of the tableau, was that Cas looked peaceful.

  


The sky grew darker as they neared Iowa the next day, and the air was too heavy to stir a breeze as they rattled down the gravel roads. It usually took a lot more than the weather to make Sam Winchester nervous, but he was glad when Dean pulled into the driveway of a white-painted farmhouse with a pile of newspapers on the front stoop. The clouds pressed down on them, dark and heavy, stirring the same primal unease as a wendigo or vampire.

Sam felt very small as he carried the duffel bags to the house, the rabbit inside his chest acutely aware of how the flat land offered no cover, of how huge the low-hanging sky was. Electricity simmered in the air, not crackling, not moving, but there. It felt as though the land was waiting for something, though what he did not know. And when it came…

It was like he could see the earth in its entirety, as though the land cupped by the storm clouds was all that remained of the world. And when it came, that unknown signal, it would be scoured by lightning or baptized by rain, and he knew not which. He shuddered, the strange scent of the impending storm filling his nostrils.

  


Inside the house, Dean moved too fast, talked too much, flitted from room to room turning on the lights. Sam could practically feel the rabbit kicking in his brother’s chest, could hear him trying to drown out its mantra. Cas, too exhausted to explore, sat on the wood trimmed sofa in the living room, huddled in his coat, shivering.

“I’ve checked out the top floor.” Dean clattered down the stairs, far more loudly than was necessary.

“Find anything?” Sam asked.

“Yeah, you’re going to get what you always wanted.”

“Which is?” Sam glanced distractedly at Cas, still hunched on the floral sofa. A lot of the things he had wanted didn’t seem important anymore, compared to what he imagined having now: a planet that wasn’t about to be torn apart, a brother without the ghosts of Hell in his head, a Heaven that actually cared about doing some good.

“Your own room!”

Sam must have looked blank, because Dean pressed on: “Don’t you remember? You used to complain to Dad about it all the time. You were always going on about privacy, and personal space- God, I thought he would make you sleep in the car just so he wouldn’t have to hear it.

“Anyways, you don’t really have much of a choice now. The other room’s just got a couple of twin beds. You’d stick off ‘em by a mile.”

Sam agreed; he’d been fifteen the last time he’d been able to sleep comfortably on a twin mattress.

“Hey Cas.” Dean headed into the living room. “I’ve found a better place for you to crash than that butt-ugly couch.”

Cas ascended the stairs excruciatingly slowly, planting each foot deliberately and clutching both the railing and the bannister. Dean followed him, forcing himself to pause frequently so he didn’t step on Castiel’s heels. Either the curse was working faster now that Castiel no longer had his Grace, or Cas had been putting a lot of effort into concealing its effects. A week ago he could have teleported up the stairs without apparent effort, but now they might as well be Mount McKinley.

“You ok, Cas?” Dean asked. The angel had stopped and was swaying slightly, head down. _Jesus, please don’t pass out again…_

Castiel lifted his head with obvious effort and nodded once. Whatever those ass-hats in Heaven had taken away from him, they sure as Hell hadn’t touched his dignity.  
Castiel lifted his right foot, swung it up and forward, setting it down on the next step. Step. Pause. Step. Pause. He continued the journey to the top, Dean Winchester following behind him.

“You just rest there a bit, ok?” Dean said once Cas was lying on the small bed. He was on the blankets, rather than in them, but the upper rooms were stifling, and he had that ridiculous coat. Besides, Dean was not about to tuck a grown adult in. “I’m gonna go downstairs and see if Sam’s found any wifi, or if I’m gonna have to listen to him bitch about being in the sticks.”

As it turned out, the family whose house they were “borrowing” had decided to join the twenty-first century, and the office nook jutting off of the living room housed a desktop computer and a wireless modem. Sam had already used the password to connect his laptop to the internet, and was frowning in concentration as he stared at the screen.

“Am I interrupting something?” Dean asked with an exaggerated waggle of his eyebrows. “Nah. Nope, I’m not,” he answered himself as he leaned closer to the screen, reading the article displayed there.

“It’s called research, Dean.” Sam didn’t bother to look up. “Not everyone thinks the internet is for porn.”

Dean shrugged, pulling a face that Sam didn’t turn around to see.

“The PC is set up so you don’t need a password to login, if you want to help.”

Several hours later, Dean was starting to see why Bobby had been so stumped. All their usual sources had nothing, Project Gutenberg was useless, and googling turned up squat. If angels had pulled this crap before, like Castiel had claimed, they’d really kept it on the down low. “I’ve got bupkis,” Dean said, tilting his chair back so it stood on only two legs. “You?”

“That’s not even nothing.” Sam walked up behind Dean and glanced over the wall of text on the monitor. “That’s, like, some teenager’s crappy story.”

“I know.” Dean leaned forward, allowing the chair’s front legs to fall back onto the floor. “Like I said, bupkis.”

Dean rubbed the bridge of his nose. His head felt fogged from hours staring at the screen, but when he looked over his shoulder, Sam was already back on his laptop, typing something, even though Dean couldn’t think of any search terms they hadn’t already tried. Maybe “Heaven sucks balls, Hell is worse. How do we break this goddamn curse?” Yeah right. If he had to stare at this screen any longer, the buzzing in his brain was going to blossom into a full-on headache. “I’m going to go check on Cas.”

Sam nodded, distracted by whatever he was reading, and barely seemed to notice Dean walking out. 

  


The air was oppressively still, and the leaves on the great elm in front of the house hung limp, but it must have been moving higher up, because the clouds had shifted. Their bellies glowed with an unearthly greenish light that silhouetted Castiel as he stood in front of the large bay window. The light seemed to darken as much as it illuminated, so while it was impossible to make out Castiel’s features, his outline stood out sharply, deep black against the eerie glow.

Dean paused near the open bedroom door. Castiel continued staring out across the land, seeming to survey it the way a hawk studies its territory. The fields and grasslands below had a stark blue cast, and the mysterious light seemed to portray them in high relief, so that each small rise glowed and every shallow hollow seemed sunk in impenetrable darkness.

Dean cleared his throat. “What’re you thinking about?”

“I am wondering what happens to angels when they die.” Castiel’s voice was gravelly.

Dean flinched. “Jesus Christ, Cas! Haven’t you ever heard of the art of conversation? If someone asks you what you’re thinking about, you say something _normal_.”

“Ah. In that case, I was contemplating the formation of these cumulonimbus clouds.”

“Oh, forget it.” Dean waved his hand dismissively and retreated back down the stairs.

  


Sam’s research wasn’t going much better than Dean’s. When the clattering from the kitchen became too distracting, he finally gave up trying to cross reference seventeenth century convictions for blasphemy in England with death records, and poked his head in to see if the erstwhile inhabitants of the farmhouse had stocked their cupboards solely with health food or if Dean was just venting his emotions.

The answer, as it turned out, was neither. Dean emerged from a cabinet clutching a jar of chili powder and a bottle of cayenne pepper. “What are you…” Sam started to ask, but his voice trailed off as he took in the ingredients piled on the counters: celery, a frozen brick of ground beef, a yellow onion, canned beans… “You’re making Dad’s chili. Oh God.”

“Dad’s _famous_ chili,” Dean amended, looking positively dangerous as he brandished a bottle of Tabasco sauce. “You realize Cas has been down at our level for almost a week, and all he’s eaten is lousy take-out and a couple of donuts? He’s never had any real food. I bet that’s what’s wrong with him as much as any angel curse.”

“That’s…” Sam bit back several possible retorts, including “That’s not food”, “That stuff could blow up a volcano”, and “Are you sure you want to kill him?” before settling on one that might actually dissuade Dean. “That is really strong stuff. Feed it to Cas, and he won’t be able to taste anything for a week.” _And if you make me eat it, I’ll wish I was dead_ , Sam added silently. “Just… tone it down, ok?”

Dean frowned at the Tabasco bottle, unconvinced.

“Come on, if you make it the way Dad used to, we’ll have to call the fire department,” Sam wheedled.

He must have struck exactly the right tone, because Dean said “Fine. I’ll take it easy on the spices. But for you, not for Cas, got it?”

Sam was so relieved he would have been fine if Dean told him he was doing it on the orders of little green men.

Sam watched, all interest in futile research forgotten, as Dean bustled around the kitchen. There really was no other word for it. It was nice to see Dean engaged in an activity that didn’t involve killing things. Still, though, he had to ask: “You sure you know what you’re doing?”

“‘Course I do,” Dean said airily. “How do you think you survived your childhood?”

 _On a diet of Chef Boyardee, occasionally supplemented with Hamburger Helper_ , Sam thought but didn’t say. Instead, he looked skeptically at the frying pan Dean had pulled out of one of the lower cupboards. As far as he was concerned, he should have gone for a soup pot.

“Oh, this?” Dean gestured with the skillet. “That’s for the celery and onions. You have to sauté them. It makes a good base for the flavors.”

Sam looked incredulous. “ _Sauté_? You? Deep-fry I’d buy, but _sauté_?”

“Shut up. I told you I knew how to cook.” Dean’s tone was one of affronted dignity, but his chest was puffed with pride.

The first peals of thunder rumbled through the house as the kitchen filled with the almost sweet scent of cooking onions. Dean continued cooking as the storm intensified, adding spices (“They have to toast, Sam. It brings out the flavor.”), and the still frozen pound of ground beef.

A bolt of lightning struck nearby, so intense that for a moment Sam could only see the glowing afterimage. The thunder hit nearly simultaneously, rattling the windows in their frames.

“Gotta be majorly weird. Dishing this out for thousands of years, then, poof, you’re on the other side, you know?” Dean was saying, his voice tinny and indistinct as Sam’s ears rang from the thunder. His outline was blurred by the lightning’s persistent afterglow. “Watch this for a minute?” He held out the spoon to Sam, who blinked to resolve the three ghost images into one. “Stir it, but not too much, or the meat will never brown. And make sure you scrape the bottom of the pan.”

Dean walked out of the kitchen, then stuck his head back in. “And if it dries out, splash in some water, not more oil. It doesn’t need any more grease.”

“Dean,” Sam said, torn between laughter and annoyance. “I think I can handle this. Just go.” 

  


The door was closed, but not latched. Dean paused outside the room. There were a lot of reasons why a guy could want some privacy, several of which Dean did not want to walk in on. But Cas was a former angel, and there was a lot of stuff that just wouldn’t occur to him. Besides, Dean remembered how exhausted Cas had been lately. He was probably sleeping- or, Dean corrected himself as another clap of thunder shook the house- trying to sleep.

Dean pushed the door ajar and stuck his head into the room. It was very dark. The curtains were still open, but the storm clouds were so heavy that they cast a premature night. It took Dean’s eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness, during which time he futilely scanned the room, finally locating an oddly-shaped lump on the furthest bed.

“Cas?” he asked.

No answer.

“Cas? You ok in there?” Dean took a tentative step into the room.

The presumably-Cas lump shuddered.

“I’m, uh, coming in now, so if you’re doing anything weird, cut it out.” Dean chided himself for his hesitation. Just because a room was dark and quiet and felt way too empty didn’t mean there was a monster in it. Even if you were a Winchester.

“Cas?” Dean asked cautiously, approaching the bed. He couldn’t deny that he felt a certain relief when he saw that it was indeed the angel lying there, not some ghost or emaciated ghoul. He was lying on his side, knees drawn nearly to his chest. His ribs rose and fell with rapid, staccato breaths that made Dean think of a run-over dog he had once seen by the side of the highway. The animal had been so badly wounded he’d had no choice but to shoot it.

Castiel gave no sign that he was aware of Dean’s presence. Dean walked slowly around the foot of the bed, peering down at the angel. Castiel’s eyes were wide, the whites almost glowing in the darkness. They darted rapidly, focusing on things Dean could not see.The jagged creases in his oversized trench coat stood out like weathered cordilleras, making it look as though he were half buried. He was speaking, too. Dean wondered if it was even English; the words flowed like a stream, bubbling, fast, occasionally changing direction or drying up altogether.

“Hey,” Dean bent lower over the bed, his voice gentle and calming, the same one he used with people, especially women and children, who had been confronted by things their conscious mind had no name for, and now huddled in corners of their basements, terrified of the suddenly unfamiliar world.

“....made to protect… all the world so beautiful… only an angel can kill an angel… Lucifer falling like fire from Heaven… only an angel can kill an angel...wings like ash on the ground… brothers… angels weren’t meant to die…”

“Cas! Snap out of it!” Dean grabbed his shoulder, but Cas shuddered and twisted away.

“Fire falling from the sky… don’t understand… why would you… made to protect them…” His whole body was shaking so hard now that the mattress groaned in protest. Dean thought of Sam, seizing on Bobby’s floor, but Cas’s eyes gazed at some distant object, the irises visible, and his voice continued, low and terrible.

“Demons crawling out of the earth… so much fighting for so long… battles never stopped… no peace in Heaven… no peace…there was a plan, there was an ending… no more… all light… angels weren’t meant to die… wasn’t true… wasn’t true… no end… the fighting never stops…” Castiel stared at a point past or through Dean Winchester, and reached out, seemingly blindly, seizing either side of his jacket just below the collar.

“Cas, calm down; it’s me, Dean.” Dean tried to pull away, but Castiel’s grip was alarmingly strong.

“It never stops… _the fighting never stops_ …” Castiel’s fists clenched, clutching more of the olive green fabric and dragging Dean close enough that his knees buckled slightly. He was so close to Cas’s face he could not look away from his eyes: dilated, shining a brilliant blue, wide enough that the iris was surrounded on all sides by white. Castiel’s hands were shaking, the tremor throbbing through all of Dean’s body, but his stare was fixed, and for the first time Dean felt certain that Cas saw him, or maybe more than him, things that only angels still full of Grace could see. “ _ **It never stops**_ …” Castiel voice was a hoarse, urgent whisper, yet it resonated, drawing Dean in, fixing him in a terrible paralysis in which he could neither draw breath nor feel his heart beat, until a massive clap of thunder shattered the spell, shook the entire house, and Dean tore himself away, running frantically toward the door.

He was halfway down the stairs before he realized the power had gone out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for: Nightmares, thunderstorms, mentions of death, and lewd remarks.


	3. Seek and

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean wondered if Castiel's coat had hung so loosely when invisible wings had been hidden under it.

  


“The power went out,” Sam said, still clutching the spoon.

“Tell me something I don’t already know,” Dean shot back, clutching the doorframe. His heart was still pounding from whatever creepy bullcrap Cas had pulled upstairs. If he were well enough to stand up without wobbling around like a drunken sailor for a good twenty seconds, Dean would’ve let him have it. He still had half a mind to go back upstairs and call him out, but the other half was suggesting getting as far away as possible, maybe curling up in a ball on the floor of the Impala.

“So what should I do with this?” Sam asked. “You don’t intend to just eat a pan of meat, do you?” he added when Dean didn’t reply, but continued staring vaguely in the direction of the skillet.

Right. No freaking out in front of Sammy.

“Nah,” Dean said. “Though that wouldn’t be too bad. I mean, that’s almost a decent burrito right there.”

“Dean. Ew.”

Dean laughed, and hoped it didn’t sound forced. “No, Sam, we’re going to finish this chili _a la rustica_.”

“ _A la rustica_? Dean, now you’re just messing with me.”

Dean was, though he wasn’t about to admit it. “Remember that fireplace in the living room? We can get a fire going, shove a soup pot in there and heat everything up. Chili isn’t fussy- except for the sautéeing-” Dean was pleased to see Sam roll his eyes at that addition “-and we’ve got canned beans, so all we have to do is let the flavors blend.”

Lying to Sam, Dean thought as he crumpled up newspaper to start the fire, had some fringe benefits. Dean had encountered the phrase “fake it til you make it” on some cheesy shrink’s daytime TV program, and though he wasn’t feeling one hundred percent normal yet- whatever that was worth these days- at least his heart was no longer trying to embellish those fancy Enochian engravings on his ribs.

Dean wadded up another piece of newspaper. It crunched loudly, and he realized it was pretty much the only sound in the room. “Hey, Sam, you afraid to get ink on your hands or something?” Dean turned around to see Sam sitting a few feet away, squinting at an article in the low light. “What, three hours of research isn’t enough for you?”

“No, Dean, I think this is important,” Sam frowned, his dark hair flopping into his eyes.

“Buy-one-get-one at the local pub? Sorry, Sam, but I don’t think we’re making it out tonight.”

“No, _really_ important.” Sam held up the page, displaying the headline “Mount Vernon Man Disappears”.

“Our kind of disappears?” Dean’s face settled into a familiar, worried expression.

“I think so. I mean, everything here says he was acting perfectly normal until he just didn’t come home.”

“So he was bored with Pleasantville. Had another lady on the side. Decided he’d had enough of Hillary and wanted to move in with Monica.”

“Dean, most people don’t have that kind of double life.”

“Yeah, well, _some_ people do,” Dean said darkly, suddenly scowling.

Crap. Sam hadn’t meant to make this about John. “He would’ve at least taken his suitcase,” he pointed out.

Dean scrunched his shoulders into a noncommittal shrug. Sam figured this was as close as he was likely to get to an acknowledgement of the reasonableness of his statement.

“That’s it then?” Dean asked. “No bleeding walls, no mysterious tracks? No cattle mutilations?”

“The article didn’t mention the family experiencing any omens, and I usually have to look up the cow stuff in an agricultural journal,” Sam said.

“Dude, this is Iowa,” Dean argued. “The cows would be right on the front page.”

“Maybe,” Sam said. “Except someone’s crumpled up the rest of the paper and thrown it in the fireplace.”

Dean didn’t look the least bit apologetic. “So, you saying you want to check it out?”

Sam hesitated. “I don’t know… we came here for the library, but this guy, his family, they don’t deserve whatever this is. Even if we can’t do anything for them, maybe we can stop it from happening again. We’d have to split up; Cas is in no shape for a hunt. So maybe you and Cas hit the books and I drive down to Mount Vernon?”

Dean held up his hand. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on a second. How come I get stuck with Mr. Stick Up His Ass and the shriveled librarians while you get to go drive _my_ car?” Sam sighed. Sometimes, like now, he could swear Dean was just trying to be difficult. “Because,” he said, hoping the truth would flatter his brother, “Cas listens to you. If you tell him he’s not acting like a normal human being, he’ll knock it off- or at least he’ll try. I’m not sure he’d take me so seriously. I guess I’ve just never gotten the vibe that he trusted me quite as much.”

Dean scoffed loudly. “Huh. Don’t waste your time trying to psychoanalyze that one, Sam; he’s just plain weird. Freakin’ angel.”

“Dean, keep it down,” Sam hissed frantically, glancing over his shoulder in the direction of the stairs. “He might hear you.”

“And what, I’d hurt his feelings?” Dean’s voice grew even louder. “News flash, Sammy: he’s an angel. He doesn’t have any.”

“Dean, you know that’s not true.” Sam’s frown wrinkled his forehead.

“He has as many facial expressions as Joan Rivers pumped full of Botox!” Dean shot back.

Sam’s frown deepened. Awake, Castiel defaulted to approximately two expressions: confused and grumpy. But asleep was a whole other story, and though Sam knew he and Dean might never talk about it, Dean had heard it, and it wasn’t like him to just deny it so cavalierly. “Dean, did something happen?”

“What did I say about the psychoanalysis? Shut up and give me that article.”

Sam complied, and Dean read in stony silence.

“You missed something, boy genius,” Dean said finally. He underlined a sentence with his finger: “Richard Greene, 47, is a devoted member of United Methodist Church, and an active volunteer for many community causes.” He indicated another: “‘I don’t understand why something like this would happen,’ his wife Karen said tearfully during our Sunday interview. ‘He only ever wanted to serve God’s will.’”

Sam swallowed. “You mean…?”

Dean looked grim. “Yeah, some other poor sucker got Raptured. You can call Bobby if you want, but face it, we’re out of our depth.”

As the paper burnt to ash along with the rest of the _Herald_ , Sam thought of Jimmy Novak, the man who had died chained to a comet, and hoped Richard Greene’s story would have a different ending. He suspected it was a futile wish.

The temperature had dropped about ten degrees since the thunderstorm rolled in, but it still wasn’t cool by any stretch of the imagination, and the humidity made Sam feel like he was breathing split pea soup. They didn’t need a fire in the conventional sense of the term, but there was something comforting about the small blaze nonetheless. Their eyes were drawn to the orange light which, though it flickered, was far more constant than the flashes of lightning. More than that, it was theirs, something that belonged to humanity, a small outpost against the raging storm.

Dean was hunkered down in front of the fire, stirring the kettle of chili. As Sam watched, he stuck the stirring spoon in his mouth and made a contemplative face. “Almost done,” he said with his mouth full, then swallowed. Sam didn’t tell him off for double dipping; he had given up on that a decade ago. “Mmm, this is good stuff. Think Giada would want to be with me if she tried it?”

“Dean, that’s disgusting. She’s married.”

“Never stopped anyone before, has it?” Dean gave his brother a cheeky grin as he headed toward the stairs.

  


Deep down, Dean Winchester knew he was a coward. That was the only reason why some spaced-out sleeptalking angel could freak him out as bad as it did. But at least he wasn’t so much of a coward he had to make his kid brother deal with it.

His impression of cowardice was reinforced when he opened the bedroom door and was deeply relieved to find Castiel awake and more-or-less coherent. At least, as coherent as a guy who talked like old-fashioned liturgy ever was.

“Hey Cas,” Dean said. He could see him sitting on the edge of the mattress, shoulders slumped as though from exhaustion, though as far as Dean knew, he had spent the entire afternoon in that bed. He wondered if his coat had hung so loosely when invisible wings had been hidden under it. “Dinner’s ready.”

Castiel stood with difficulty, bracing both hands against the mattress. “Thank you.” Castiel navigated the dark, unfamiliar room with difficulty, balance wavering as he picked his way around the furniture. 

Dean remembered how he’d climbed the stairs earlier that day. If he tried going down now, he’d probably fall and break his neck. “Hey, let me give you a hand.”

Castiel clutched Dean’s arm as they walked down the short hallway towards the stairs.

“If you were a little old lady, I’d be getting my boy scout badge right about now,” Dean quipped.

“I do not understand.” Castiel sounded confused, and perhaps a bit short of breath.

“Yeah, well, nothing new.” Dean rolled his eyes. He could feel Cas wavering despite his handhold.

It would be easier and safer this way, he decided.

“Hey Cas, did you know they’d installed an elevator?” Dean lifted the fallen angel into his arms.

Castiel, it turned out, wasn’t heavy, so Dean carried him all the way to the sofa, where the three sat and ate their fortunately not-too-spicy chili, watching the flames crackle and burn low.

  


The storm spent itself by morning, and they awoke to fresh, clear air and a brilliant blue sky speckled with white fluffy clouds. The only signs of the preceding night’s violence were the huge puddles lying across the gravel roads.

“Ah man, and I just washed her, too!” Dean complained as another swell of mud splashed over the Impala’s shiny black paint.

“Dude, if you keep going so slow, we’re never going to get there,” Sam said.

“If we go any faster, we’ll get swamped by these mini-lakes and stall out,” Dean countered. “Besides, it’s just until we get to the highway.”

It was just until they got to the highway, and by the time they arrived at the University of Dubuque campus, Sam profoundly regretted ever having said anything. Even Castiel seemed slightly terrified, or perhaps slightly impressed- Sam couldn’t really tell.

“It appears I had not given automobiles sufficient credit,” he said. “They are faster than I previously believed.”

“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” Dean cackled. “Wait ‘til the trip back!”

“No, Dean. Absolutely not,” Sam said firmly.

“You are a total spoilsport,” Dean groused as he helped Cas from the backseat. “Guy’s never had any fun in what, a couple thousand years?”

“I have existed since before the dawn of humanity,” Castiel said formally.

“See? Guy’s seen every car we’ve ever made. About time he had some fun in one.”

“Dean, that sounds dirty.”

The ensuing argument about whether or not Dean had willingly been flinging double entendres at the angel lasted until they reached the front of the tall, brick library. Without a word, the two Winchesters transformed from squabbling siblings into respectable graduate students. Cas remained as he often was: somewhat rumpled and slightly puzzled looking.

“Good morning,” Sam greeted the librarian. “I’m looking for resources on the theology of redemption as it intersects with mysticism and belief in divine intervention.” Behind him, Dean gaped open mouthed.

“Oh, and my colleague is looking for books on local historical religious figures.

“Preferably nothing with very long words,” Sam added with a grin.

“ _Theology of redemption as it intersects with mysticism and divine whoosie-whatsits_?” Dean hissed as the librarian walked away, apparently so flabbergasted he was willing to let the insult slide. “Jesus, Sam, I thought you were in school to become a lawyer, not a priest.”

Sam smiled, secretly proud that he had impressed his brother.

The sense of pride diminished, though, as the morning wore on, and turned into afternoon, and they dug through piles of musty books, and peered through brittle microfiche, and found, as Dean eloquently put it “Jack shit”.

“Still no luck?” The librarian asked as she carried yet another mountain of books to their table. The librarian was actually young enough that Dean would normally be flirting with her, but when Sam glanced across the table, he saw Dean absorbed in a thick volume, and Cas either on the verge of passing out again or going cross eyed from the small type.

“Nothing yet,” Sam admitted.

“You’ve been through most of the collection.” Her accent was soft, but had a little twang that suggested she was not originally from Iowa. “Almost all of the parts that are relevant.”

“Have you got any other suggestions?” Sam stole a glance at Cas. He was still conscious; good. “You’ve been so helpful so far. Please.” He saw Cas sway slightly in his peripheral vision. “It’s important.”

“Well,” the librarian put her index finger to her lightly glossed lips. “The Andover Newton Theological School in Massachusetts is about _the_ preeminent resource for religious matters in the United States. Maybe they would have something that would help?”

“Thanks,” Sam said. Dean finally looked up from his book to watch the librarian walk back to the central desk, her hips swaying in her tight pencil skirt. He tore his gaze away at the soft thud of Castiel’s face hitting an open theology book.

“Sorry,” Cas said stiffly, raising his head. With a pang of guilt, Sam realized they had neither stopped nor eaten since they arrived. He had set the pace for him and Dean, and forgot to alter it for Cas.

“We struck out here, we’ll try again in Massachusetts,” Dean said gruffly, as though trying to dismiss the situation, but he sounded less confident than before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for swearing and lewd remarks.


	4. One Hand on the Throttle, The Other on the Brake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “DEAN! Pull over, NOW!”  
> Dean responded instantly. Before the Impala could travel forward another forty feet, he had pulled onto the shoulder, coasting to a perfect stop. Only as he was reaching for the parking brake did Sam’s words reach his conscious mind.

  


“Yeah, Jenkins, I _know_ that they’re demons… uh-huh, I know what that means. Look, I already told you, we’re working our own case. It’s like fuckin’ whack-a-mole out here, man…. What is it? It’s mind your own goddamn business because I already told you, GO CALL SOMEONE ELSE.” Dean paced back and forth on the back porch, his voice rising in frustration as Sam watched awkwardly from the doorway. “Yeah, well, same to you! And you can go to Hell.” Dean snapped his phone shut and glared at Sam. “What?”

“I’ve got everything packed up, and we’ve been looking for you for the past fifteen minutes,” Sam said. “Cas is starting to freak out. He thinks you might have been kidnapped by vengeful angels or something, and he’s looking for you everywhere.”

“Geez, can’t a guy get any space? For all you guys knew, I could’ve been in the bathroom or something.”

“Yeah, that’s one of the places he checked,” Sam responded.

Dean turned crimson, and muttered that someone should teach Castiel about privacy.

“What was going on back there?” Sam asked, indicating the porch.

“Oh, that was Jenkins. Remember him?”

Sam did. They had worked with the hunter on a few previous occasions; he remembered him as largely taciturn, but deeply stubborn. It hadn’t caused a problem before- if anything, it had helped them push themselves a little bit harder- but Dean’s conversation had sounded anything but friendly.

“He found a buttload of demons down in Kentucky. They’re trying to scare up sacrifices for Lucifer or some crap. There’s too many for one guy to take on, so Jenkins is trying to call in the cavalry.”

“And you told him no?” Sam was a bit taken aback. On the one hand, it was fairly clear what had happened, and they probably weren’t going to be getting any friendly calls from Jenkins any time soon. On the other, Dean had seemed willing to take the Mount Vernon hunt before he realized it was out of their depth. He wondered what had changed in those few days.

“It’s like you said the other night, Sam,” Dean said with a forced shrug. Dean utterly sucked at acting casual, or maybe it was just that Sam had known him for his entire life. Either way, he could see that Dean’s neck and jaw were stiff in the way that indicated he was trying to restrain his emotions. “Cas is in no shape to hunt, but how do you tell him that? You know his whole schtick about angels being soldiers of God. How do you tell a guy he can’t do what he’s been doing his entire life without making him feel useless?”

Sam suspected he already knew. The differences between the Cas of two weeks ago and the Cas of today were painfully obvious. Still, it felt jarring and wrong to hear Dean acknowledge it- Dean who pretended the emotional complications of their life didn’t exist until he could no longer hold back and wound up crying on the side of the road. It made him wonder again if he had missed something, if the situation was worse than he thought.

So it was almost a relief when Dean switched topics and shifted tone, his voice becoming irritated as he insisted: “And we _are_ working a case, so he had no right to harp on us like that. Guy can go screw a cactus far as I’m concerned.”

Sam thought of the band of demons, planning sacrifices that might awaken an even greater evil. He liked Cas; he owed him his brother, but the life of one cursed, fallen angel weighed small against tens or hundreds of innocents. He remembered, suddenly, the copper tang of demon blood in his mouth and the burning desire to stop Lilith at any cost. Maybe that was where it all went wrong; maybe the answer was not the bigger picture, but the little pieces right in front of you.

His doubt must have showed on his face, for Dean said “I know we’re doing this for Cas, but it wouldn’t be so different if it were some schmoe off the street who got on the wrong side of a coven.

“We’re hunters, it’s what we do: save people and hunt things.” 

  


The afternoon sun glared through the windows, forcing Sam to squint and making his face uncomfortably warm. He twisted in his seat, futilely trying to find some way to stretch his legs. The worst thing about the Impala’s bench seat was that he couldn’t scoot back while Dean drove: either his brother couldn’t reach the pedals, or Sam’s knees got really well acquainted with the underside of the dash, and this was a pretty clear case of “driver chooses, shotgun shuts his cakehole.”

Dean was about at the end of his driving tether, as evidenced by the fact he had pulled off the highway and was now cruising through a small town, scanning for some likely looking place to take a break. Either that or- Sam used the side mirror to look at the backseat, where Castiel was wearing one of his two default expressions, the one that suggested he had recently sat on a hedgehog- he wasn’t sure how much more Cas could take.

Usually Dean drove until Sam thought his bladder was about to explode, or that he was actually going to pass out from hunger. He had no idea how his brother took it, and was pretty sure he was going to pay for it someday. But in of recognition of the last few days, Dean was driving much more cautiously, actually stopping the car before the fuel gauge reached the red line. Every time they stopped at some picnic table or parking lot, Sam could see him practically chafing with impatience. It wasn’t so much their destination as the road that called to Dean, and he hated to leave it even for a minute.

Sam saw a hand painted sign reading “Farmer’s Market.” He craned his neck, looking back over his shoulder to see the row of tables.

“Dean. Hey, Dean. Can you stop here?”

Dean looked up from the road and glanced in the general direction of Sam’s stare. “A Farmer’s Market, Sam? Are you serious? Look, you want health food, get a Salad Shaker at the next diner. I won’t make fun of you, I swear. Just don’t go and buy a whole head of lettuce from a bunch of dirty hippies.”

“No, Dean, that’s not it.” Sam’s hips and lower back were starting to ache from being confined in the cramped space, and he didn’t have the patience to explain. “Just stop here, ok?”

“I told you you should have used that rest area thirty miles back!” Dean hollered out the window as Sam hobbled away from the car. Sam rolled his eyes but otherwise ignored his brother.

  


“That one?” the man behind the table asked. He wore aviator-style sunglasses he had probably owned since the seventies and a tan canvas hat, and had a round potbelly that made him sit nearly a foot away from the table. A neatly trimmed salt and pepper beard covered his cheeks, and the lines on his face suggested that he often smiled. “It’s a real old piece of cherry,” he added as though he expected this to convince his customer.

“I think so,” Sam said, running his hands over the deep red-brown wood. It had been carved into a tight spiral and so highly polished that it felt silky.

“For your father?” the man asked.

“For a friend,” Sam said, and was relieved when the only question the man asked was “How tall is he?”

“About four inches shorter than me,” Sam said.

“Then I’ll need to chop a couple of inches off of the bottom,” the man said, lifting the walking stick from Sam’s hands. “I make ‘em extra long. Most people don’t, but sometimes we get giants like you.”

Sam watched as he sawed a short piece of wood off of the bottom of the cane and deftly sanded the raw end. He blew away the dust and capped it with a rubber foot.

“Thank you,” Sam said, handing him some folded bills from his wallet.

  


They resumed their usual pace the next day. “We wasted way too much time screwing around yesterday,” Dean said, fingers drumming on the steering wheel. He didn’t quite look at Sam as he said it, but his shoulders angled in his general direction.

Sam shifted uncomfortably. He didn’t regret stopping, especially not once he saw how much more stable Castiel was with the cane, but Dean was radiating so much impatience that there was barely room left in the car for his passengers.

Sam supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. Dean didn’t have much beyond the Impala and the highway. He didn’t even pray. It had only been three years since Sam learned that, but it felt like he had known it for far longer. It had been a long three years. The road had been one of the only constants in Dean’s life, always there, always promising a way out and a new chance. Maybe he prayed to that as much as anything. Maybe this time it hadn’t given him what he’d asked for.

The sky deepened to indigo, then to black, and they rolled on. The dense canopy of leaves that hung over the road melted into the night sky.

It was late, they hadn’t stopped for dinner, and the winding turns rocked the Impala with a cradle’s rhythm. Sam felt his eyelids grow heavy. He tried to fight it; if Dean was going to drive this madman’s course, he was going to make sure he didn’t kill them all in the process. But eventually the weight grew too much, and Sam’s head slumped forward, and he slept.

_The blond haired man sat on a stool in the darkened room. The only light was what shone around him, a spotlight. Everything else was black and featureless, the stage of a modernist play._

“You could stop it, Sam.” The blond man didn’t bother to greet him. They already knew each other.

“Stop what?” Sam lied, throat tightening, heart pounding.

“Stop everything.” The blond man smiled. “What’s going to happen. What’s happening right now.

“Your choice, Sammy.”

Sam jerked awake with a strangled gasp. Only familiarity built up over long years of experience kept him from cracking his head on the ceiling of Impala. Dean barely glanced his way. Maybe he was used to his brother waking up like this.

_What’s happening right now…_

Sudden instinct blossomed like fire in his mind and struck him like a fist in the gut, and Sam whirled around, staring into the backseat, trying to pierce the darkness-

“DEAN! Pull over, NOW!”

Dean responded instantly. Before the Impala could travel forward another forty feet, he had pulled onto the shoulder, coasting to a perfect stop. Only as he was reaching for the parking brake did Sam’s words reach his conscious mind. “Sammy? What..?” But Sam had already swung out of the passenger seat, the door slamming behind him.

Dean look around in confusion. Windshield: grassy shoulder and some low hanging branches. Passenger’s side: trees. Backseat: _Oh God_. Castiel, knees drawn to his chest, body twisted awkwardly to one side, head lolling, face blue-white. His chest moved spasmodically, and Dean could see that his breaths were shallow and irregular. Now that the purr of the engine was fading away to the occasional pings of cooling metal, Dean could hear, too, that each breath was a truncated gasp. Sam was already opening the back door. Castiel’s limp body started to tumble out, but Sam caught him, wrapping his strong arms around his chest, easing him back into a reclining position, Brady’s voice echoing in his ears.

Brady had been his friend in college, on track for pre-med before he had suddenly embraced the most corrosive aspects of party culture, drinking, sleeping with every girl who’d consider him, downing tablets of ecstasy. He remembered Brady once, most of the way through a six pack, becoming sentimental and talking about his niece. “She has asthma real bad,” he’d said. “Sucks. She’s got medicine and stuff for it, but sometimes they, just hold her.”

“Hold her?”

“Yeah, get her to relax, open her diaphragm, stop freaking out. If she stops fighting it, sometimes that’s enough.”

 _Sometimes that’s enough_. Sam no longer had anyone to pray to, so all he could do was hope he was doing the right thing, and that it would work, as he eased Cas’s head onto his shoulder and swung himself awkwardly into the car, ducking his head to avoid hitting it on the ceiling.

Cas took a gasping breath, maybe a little fuller than the one that had preceded it, then stiffened.

“It’s ok,” Sam murmured soothingly. “It’s just me, Sam.” Cas’s shoulders dug painfully into his chest just below his collarbone and the cords in his neck stood out. Sam’s heart sank. So it was true, then, what he’d always wondered. The demon blood did matter. Cas had never knowingly been rude to him, but he had always been more distant towards Sam then to Dean. Sam told himself there were plenty of good reasons for that: Cas had pulled Dean out of Hell, Dean had the whole Righteous Man and Vessel of Michael, Beginning and End of the Apocalypse thing going, and Cas seemed to have a tendency to fixate on his mission. So if Cas seemed a bit cold, Sam had told himself, it didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the demon blood. But now he had proof. Cas, barely conscious, acting purely on instinct, resisted him. He didn’t trust him.

Sam swallowed back the wave of black guilt, though he couldn’t stop creeping sensation of uncleanness from prickling his skin. He couldn’t give in to his emotions now; Cas needed help and Sam couldn’t give it to him.

Sam’s mind raced. Dean wasn’t exactly the model of tempered reason and emotional stability. So if he said he needed Dean to take Cas because he was afraid of Sam’s dark side, he would unleash a torrent of recriminations aimed at all three of them: Cas for not trusting Sam the way Dean thought he should, Sam for worrying too much about the issue, and himself for not adequately reassuring his brother. They didn’t have time to weather Dean’s storm of anger and betrayal and guilt.

Sam felt like even more of a skunk as he began his subterfuge. It didn’t really help that this was the only way he could think of; he was tired of lies and deception and just wanted to be able to do things in a straightforward manner, to have something go right for once.

It didn’t take much effort to put on a pained face.

“Dammit,” Sam muttered under his breath, just loudly enough that Dean heard and stopped pacing on the shoulder, whirling on Sam in an instant.

“What is it? Is Cas-”

“Charlie horse,” Sam grunted through clenched teeth, trying to find a way to move his leg while pinned beneath Cas in the narrow backseat.

“Hey, I’ll take over,” Dean said hastily.

Sam cringed, not out of pain, but because he was taking advantage of his brother’s instinct to protect him.

“What do I do?” Dean asked, suddenly uncertain, as Sam swung himself out of the backseat and settled Cas into his brother’s arms.

“Just- hold him.” Sam was pacing on the side of the road, limping a little as he worked out the “charlie horse”.

“Hold him?” Dean sounded skeptical. “Dude, not a soap or a rom com.”

“It’s supposed to, I dunno, open his diaphragm or something. Make it easier to breathe. A premed student told me about it.”

“I bet he got that from TV,” Dean grumbled. Despite his doubtful expression, he crammed himself into the backseat and matched his position to his brother’s earlier posture.

Sam breathed a soft sigh of relief as he saw Castiel relax, his muscles going limp and his breaths becoming more deep and natural.

“You know, the last time there was an angel in the back seat, I got to be on top.” Dean’s joke sounded flat even to himself, and he was glad Sam couldn’t hear it and Cas wouldn’t get it even if he were fully conscious. Cas nestled his head into the crook of Dean’s neck. He started to pull away, but realized he was supposed to be getting Cas to calm down. It would be a jerk move, even by his less than stellar standards, to let a guy suffocate because he couldn’t stand a little weird, really awkward physical contact. Dean glanced at Sam. He was still pacing on the side of the road, limping less as the knot in his leg worked itself out. _This was totally your idea_ , he thought as loudly as he could, just in case his brother had picked up any psychic powers he hadn’t told him about.

Cas’s trench coat draped over him like a blanket. Dean could feel his breathing gradually growing deeper and steadier, his heart slowing from a panicked pounding to a calmer rate. It was still freaking weird, but it was also kind of peaceful. The road must have been quiet during the day, because it was essentially deserted at night. The only sounds were the wind rustling the leaves, crickets chirping, Castiel breathing and the steady crunching of gravel under Sam’s feet. Castiel’s eyes were no longer glazed with terror and his gaze was calm and steady.

Dean knew that he couldn’t spend the entire night on the side of the road with an angel pretty much in his lap. He wasn’t an expert on angel curses, but he guessed Castiel needed to rest- as in, actually sleep in a normal bed. Besides, the weird factor wasn’t exactly going away. It really should have been getting worse, since Cas was awake and not bothered by the whole arrangement, but then, Dean had long ago given up on expecting normal out of Cas.

They’d have to find a hotel. Driving through the night just wasn’t going to be an option. Nor, Dean realized, was driving for hours without a break. He’d gotten them into this mess, he realized miserably. Hell, even John had never run them to the point of literal collapse. He’d be an idiot not to take this for the wake-up call it was.

Dean looked at the tree-lined road and inwardly groaned. Of all the times to be in Back End of Nowhere, Pennsylvania.

“Think you’ll be ok til we hit a town?” he asked Cas.

The angel nodded.

“You’ll tell Sam or me before it gets this bad again?” Dean tried to sound stern.

Again, Castiel nodded.

“I’d feel better if I heard you say something,” Dean heard himself admit. “You still with us?”

Castiel’s voice was a bit weak and hoarse, but it was undeniably his as he said: “I do not believe I ever left.”

“Fan-freaking-tastic, Rain Man.”

  


“Does your fancy phone-thing have anything?” Dean demanded, reaching up and adjusting the rearview mirror so he could see into the backseat.

“It’s a smartphone, Dean. And there’s no coverage out here.” Sam looked over his shoulder, too.

Cas looked like he’d been thrown into three walls, and his head hung to his chest, but he was breathing normally.

“Dammit.” Dean’s eyes were constantly moving: windshield, side mirror, rearview mirror.

“We’ll just have to look for a mileage sign.” There was an atlas of the United States in the glovebox, but it only had enough detail to help navigate between big cities. In rural Pennsylvania, it was useless.

Neither brother spoke until they passed the sign. In the backseat, they could hear Castiel’s breathing growing rougher, exhaustion again taking its toll.

“Hancock: 40 miles,” Sam said, breaking the silence.

Dean only nodded, eyes again flitting to the rearview mirror.

The winding roads and intense darkness kept even Dean from going much over the speed limit. The silence hung like a cloud. It was going to be a long forty miles.

Dean reached for the radio, turning it on without looking. There was a burst of static, then the speakers wailed out: “ _Oh- oh-oh, I just died in your arms tonight. It must have been some kind of_ -”

Dean switched the radio off, and the silence hung dark and heavy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for: swearing, lewd remarks, medical issues, nightmares, lying and manipulation and references to drugs and alcohol.


	5. Shall Strength and Shield Be

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You can forget about the whole death with dignity act, because _we aren’t going to let you die _.” Dean glared fiercely at Castiel. The angel bowed his head and said nothing.__

  


This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Not driving, not hunting, not any of it. Dean scowled down at the book in front of him. Research wasn’t his thing, but he had long since come to accept it as a necessary evil. The thing about research, though, was that it was supposed to lead to something. This- he glanced at the huge pile of books in front of Sam, the smaller one in front of Cas- was going nowhere fast. Would it be too much to ask to have one damn problem they could just shoot?

All he wanted was one goddamn break, one day where the universe wasn’t actively trying to screw him over. But between Sam being dreamstalked by Lucifer, Bobby losing the use of his legs, and now his angel crashing and burning like the Challenger, the universe had made it pretty clear that it wanted nothing more than to fuck over him and everyone he’d ever touched.

Dean glanced around the library despairingly: shelf after shelf of religious books. It had sounded like a great thing back in Iowa, but once they got there, it was like looking for a needle in a stack of needles. They’d need more time than Cas had just to put a dent in this place.

A fly buzzed overhead, its droning loud in the quiet of the library. Dean and Cas both looked up. Sam, who had ignored the fly, glanced up to see what had attracted their attention. Upon seeing the fly, Sam gave Dean a look he had named “bitchface.”

“Hey, why aren’t you doing that to Cas?” Dean demanded.

“Because he doesn’t know any better and is just copying your crap,” Sam hissed. “So get with the picture. We came here to research.”

Dean shrugged, and scowled down at his book. When Sam pointedly ignored him, returning to his own text with an air of concentration that was so self-righteous it was infuriating, Dean thumbed through the pages, crackling them loudly. 

Sam shook his head in disgust. Castiel watched in interest.

Dean grinned and closed the volume just a trifle too loudly. Two tables away, a pudgy student jumped. Dean opened the next tome with enough force that the spine cracked audibly. Sam ground his teeth but refused to look up.

Several books later- and even at a quick scan, he was pretty sure they were useless- Dean caught Castiel’s attention with an exaggerated nod and reached into the little tin of office supplies in the center of the table. He theatrically tested several rubber bands, stretching them to evaluate their strength and flexibility. Confident he’d found the right one, he sighted in the fly and fired. With a final, aborted buzz, the fly fell to the table.

This time, Sam looked up, and he had gone from bitchface to full-on pissed. “Dean, what are you doing?” He was barely able to keep his voice in library-acceptable range. “This is actually important, you know.” He gave a pointed glance at Cas, who studying the fly’s body with mild interest. “So are you going to act like you give a crap, or are you going to leave me to go through all this-” he gestured at the library “-by myself?”

Dean laced his fingers behind his head and tilted his chair back, causing it to squeak. Several heads turned in his direction, and at least one patron whispered “shush”. “I dunno, Sammy. Seems like you’re a real speed demon when it comes to books. Are you sure you even need me?”

Sam stared at him, too incredulous and angry to speak.

  


Sam was still steaming when they returned to their motel that evening. If Dean were being completely honest with himself, he might have admitted that he kind of deserved it, but he’d done about enough of staying strong before impossible odds for a dozen lifetimes. It didn’t seem fair to ask him to bet on the three legged horse again. And whether or not he deserved Sam’s silent glares, he didn’t want to put up with them, so he tossed his brother the car keys, telling him it was his turn to go get burgers. Dean generally found a drive calming, and hoped it would work on Sam, too. Pretending to sleep on a tiny roll-away cot was going to suck hard enough without his brother glaring daggers at him, too.

“Dean.” Castiel interrupted his thoughts. “I do not wish to inconvenience you or Sam in any way. I believe I made it clear from the outset: this is an impossible task. I appreciate your efforts, but perhaps it would be prudent to concentrate them on matters where the outcome still may be affected. Heaven’s will has never been impeded.

“Your concern for me is touching, but I do not wish to cause you distress. When your efforts fail, do not be concerned. Of all the deaths I could have imagined having as angel, this is perhaps the best. It is neither violent nor painful. I have learned to accept it.”

Dean’s fists clenched, and he had a sudden feeling of displacement, as though he were hearing an echo too old to still be bouncing, while simultaneously seeing Castiel’s lips move. “Bullshit, Cas. Absolute, total bullshit. You think I don’t know what you’re trying to do? You think I didn’t pull this bullcrap on Sam?

“You’re scared, Cas, scared as hell, and if you think not admitting it will make it any easier for any of us, then you’re fucking wrong.

“Everything you just said- you know what I heard? You want to live, but you’re scared. 

“Well, guess what? You can forget about the whole death with dignity act, because _we aren’t going to let you die_.” Dean glared fiercely at Castiel. The angel bowed his head and said nothing.

  


Sam’s eyebrows quirked and his mouth hung half open as he stared at his brother. The difference between yesterday and today was like night and day. While yesterday Dean had been aimlessly paging through books at best, today he was studying them seriously, writing out notes and not even indulging in terrible wisecracks. When he wasn’t poring over the books, he was checking on Cas, making sure he wasn’t too exhausted. Sam was almost tempted to pull out a penlight and check for concussion.

“I’m not finding much,” Sam was finally forced to admit. He was reluctant to acknowledge the truth that became more obvious with each book added to the “checked and useless” pile, for fear that Dean would sink into despair again and lose his newfound energy and focus.

“We haven’t been through everything in here yet. Keep trying.” 

Sam blinked. Yesterday, the library had been impossible, now Dean wanted to go through it in a day? Neither approach was exactly realistic, but Sam had to admit that he found determination the preferable of the two options.

Sam sunk back into a sort of rhythm- _useless, crap, false alarm, useless, crap, false alarm_ \- only to be drawn out of it a few hours later by Dean’s voice.

“Hey, Cas, had about enough for a while?” Dean continued without pausing to allow Castiel to answer. “Sam, I’m going to drive Cas back before he decides his corset’s too tight and passes out on us again.”

Sam looked up from his book, moderately surprised by how long he had been researching and much more surprised by the amount of attention Dean was paying to Cas. Cas’s color was headed toward the paler end of things, but not enough that Sam would have been concerned. He realized Dean had made the right call as Cas wavered as he stood up.

“Easy, I’ve got you.” Dean grabbed Castiel’s elbow even though he was already bracing himself on his cane. Sam watched the two leave, Cas still supported by Dean’s arm, and shook his head at his brother’s inscrutable changes of attitude. That didn’t mean he wasn’t happy Dean was finally getting his act together, he just wanted a window into his brother’s skull to see what went on in there.

  


“Thanks for giving me an excuse to get out of there.” Dean roughly pulled the blankets over Castiel’s chest. “There’s only so many musty old books a guy can take.

“At a time,” he added hastily. “Gonna go back there right away and keep looking ‘til I _find_ something.”

Castiel did not respond, or even look up. Dean was glad they had left when they did. It was only a fifteen minute drive from the motel to the library, but in that time, a fine tremor had gripped Cas, and when Dean helped him out of the car, it was like touching an iceberg.

Now, Cas’s eyes were at half mast, and his hands neatly folded on the edge of the blanket. Maybe he was already asleep; it was hard to tell. But Dean remembered the nightmares, the torrent of terrified speech that flowed every night. He didn’t know exactly what was going through Cas’s head, but figured he’d heard enough to have a decent idea. He’d woken up in too many unfamiliar motel rooms, uncertain of what was dream and what was reality. Sometimes, all that had gotten him through had been Sam. Hell had never been able to fake Sam right, not for more than a few minutes. If he might be able to do the same thing for Cas, was going to try. At the very least, he’d make sure he knew he was safe as he fell asleep. He’d stay here a few minutes more.

Dean was seated at the little desk, cleaning a pistol when the talking began. He was cleaning the gun because it was useful and because Heaven probably didn’t smell like Hoppe’s Gun Oil. 

“I understand that I overstepped the bounds of my objective.” Castiel’s voice was rough gravel, but a current of fear ran through it. “I know that there must be consequences for disobedience. I know that there must be-”

Dean’s throat tightened and his stomach twisted. He knew what Castiel was dreaming about.

But his voice was light and joking as he said “Keep it down, Cas. Dude next door’s gonna think you’re into some weird stuff.”

“Please. I’ve served you well for millennia. Please-” The current was stronger now, rushing over the gravel. “No, I understand. I apologize.”

Dean swallowed, a sick surge of anger making him dizzy. He knew in his gut what came next, and they were making him _apologize_? Dean knew Heaven had some sick bastards, but this was too much.

Dean got up and dragged his chair to Castiel’s bedside.

It was a torrent now: “I’m sorry… I’m sorry… I won’t disobey again… I understand what I did wrong…” Castiel gave a wordless sound of pain, somewhere between a cry and a groan, and his entire body stiffened, then he sagged back to the mattress. “Enough… Enough… Please…. Zachariah, please.”

Dean’s stomach clenched into a cold knot. “C’mon, Cas, you’re not up there any more. It’s just some crappy motel.”

Cas shuddered. “I will not error again… Will not...Make it stop… Please, make it stop…”

“Cas, snap out of it,” Dean knew he was pleading now, but he didn’t care. "It’s gonna be…” His voice trailed off. He was unable to complete the lie. The sky was crashing down, and nothing was going to be okay.

The silence hung heavily for a moment, before Castiel whimpered and jerked away from an unseen tormentor.

Dean Winchester sighed, and quietly, unconsciously, he began to sing.

_“Hey Jude, don’t make it bad_

Take a sad song and make it better…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for swearing, nightmares, mentions of torture and discussions of death.


	6. Turn the Page

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes, Dean considers changing course, heading west and south, down to the Grand Canyon. Letting Cas see what his deadbeat dad did, what theirs never showed them. But that feels too much like giving up, so he never does.

  


Nothing. There is nothing in the library. Bobby has no leads.

The hot July sun burns the grass in the empty fields and cracks the earth.

And Dean Winchester drives.

He drives. There’s something out there. There has to be. There always is.

But it’s different now. It’s like he can feel the ice getting thinner, hour by hour, day by day.

He adjusts the rearview mirror, and Castiel stares back at him, his eyes hollow and shadowed. He tilts the mirror back to its original position.

A thousand miles later, he adjusts it again. Castiel is still staring at him.

He can feel the clock ticking now. Every time the odometer rolls over, marking another tenth of a mile, the clunk feels loud and final. He finds himself looking in the backseat more.

He wonders if this was how it was for Sam. After the rawhead, after the deal.

The road rolls by, flat and featureless. There is nothing. But Dean doesn’t stop, because stopping would be admitting defeat. Stopping would be letting them win.

Library after library, empty. God knows how many historical societies, the same dead-end interviews, the same meaningless smiles.

It’s all the same after a while.

But some moments stand out:

Stopping at some rest area off the side of the highway- they stop so often now, he wonders if they’re even making six hundred miles a day. Sitting at a weathered wooden picnic table. The direct sun blazes down, making Dean sweat even though he’s not moving, but Cas is wearing that absurd coat and his teeth are chattering hard enough that Dean wonders if he’s sick, if some virus has come along to steal what little precious energy he has left, if the universe really hates them that much. So he reaches out and brushes Castiel’s cheek and neck with the back of his hand, and finds his skin cool.

“Only thing wrong with you is that you pissed off the king of the douchebags.” Dean scoffs his diagnosis cavalierly.

“That sounds like a very serious problem,” Castiel says, staring gravely at Dean with his too-big eyes.

Dean bursts into peals of unrestrained laughter, rocking with the force of his mirth, as Castiel continues to stare at him, somber and baffled. But his laughter becomes hollow and dies away as he realizes Castiel is right. He leans back back against the table and wipes the tears from his eyes. What the hell do you do when you’re on the hitlist of the most powerful jackass in Heaven?

There’s one thing Dean can do. He shrugs off the flannel shirt he’s wearing on top of his green tee- it’s too warm for a coat- and offers it to Cas. And if, after that, Sam sometimes looks in the backseat and sees Cas wrapped in his own trench coat with one of Dean’s jackets or shirts over his lap like a blanket, he has the decency or the sense of self-preservation to say nothing.

  


It’s dusk and the radio’s playing. Sam bitches about it sometimes, but Cas? Up until tonight, Dean didn’t think he could have told you what a radio was, let alone that the Impala has one. Never mind that his vessel used to sell advertising space on the AM.

But now Clapton is singing “ _I have finally found a place to live/ In the presence of the Lord_ ” and Castiel is practically climbing into the front seat, staring at the little black radio with awe and hunger. Dean turns up the volume.

After that, he sometimes fiddles with the tuner knob, twisting it until some gospel station comes soaring through the speakers. He glances in the rearview mirror, looking into the backseat. and sees Castiel listening. But as soon as the songs begin preaching about God’s wrath or judgment, he cranks the knob back to the nearest classic rock station.

It’s late in the evening. The last of the sunset is fading out behind them in muted pinks and purples, and the brothers stand leaning against the trunk of the Impala, watching the first stars kindle their glow against the dark blue eastern sky. Dean fidgets with a beat-up stainless steel flask. It holds half a pint of holy water and is one of about five things they haven’t unloaded from the Impala.

“What’s going on with you and the radio?” Sam asks.

Dean turns the flask over, feeling the holy water slosh. “What do you mean?”

Sam rolls his eyes. “Seriously, Dean? You listen to nothing but classic rock and pitch a fit the any time I listen to something from this millennium, and now it’s gospel?”

“Not all the time,” Dean says defensively. “Besides, gospel’s important. It’s part of the foundation of rock, right up there with the blues.”

One look at Sam, leaning against the Impala with his arms crossed and a little grin on his face tells Dean he doesn’t buy it.

“Look,” Dean says, rubbing the flask against his palm. “Remember those twins? The Doublemint girls?”

Sam cringes. “Why do you have to remind me?”

“‘Cause normally, you never would have given me a break about something like that. But you let it go, ‘cause I had a year left.

“Cas has what? A month, tops? He doesn’t want any of that kind of stuff-”

Sam arches his eyebrows. He remembers the debacle at the brothel. Dean had practically doubled over laughing when he had told him about it.

“-but if some of that religious music makes him happy, then who am I to argue, you know?”

Sam understands. He nods, accepting his brother’s explanation.

  


Sometimes, Dean considers changing course, heading west and south, down to the Grand Canyon. Letting Cas see what his deadbeat dad did, what theirs never showed them. But that feels too much like giving up, so he never does. Instead, when that urge comes on, he steers them to the next town, puts on a suit and tie, and goes through his useless song and dance with the historical society and the librarian.

Sometimes he feels Sam’s silent disapproval radiating out at him and wonders if he’s being a fool, if he’s pushing them too hard, if he should stop right there or head south and west. But there’s no other choice, really, so he ignores his brother and keeps going.

Twice more they pull over because Castiel’s breathing has turned to ragged gasps. Dean holds him.

Bobby Singer calls one night. He asks where they are, and Dean looks to Sam. Everywhere is the same now.

They’re in Chaska, Sam says. Chaska, Minnesota.

“You aren’t too far from Easton,” Bobby says. “Been hearing real strange things from around there. Folks go into the woods and don’t come out. The bodies they do find, they say it’s snake bite. But you’d have to go a bit further east to run into a rattler, and that ain’t the only thing that don’t add up.

“The coroner’s report says the vics were mauled by a bear, pre-mortem. Bear and a snake on the same day?”

“That’s some pretty bad luck,” Sam agrees.

“There was a lot of bad luck in _True Grit_ ,” Dean counters. “Doesn’t make it our thing.”

“Maybe a coupla years ago I would’ve agreed with you,” Bobby says. “Course, that would mean ignoring the fact that the bear was further out of range than the snake, and that they’ve found five bodies so far. But the world ain’t like it was a few years back. There’s an Apocalypse out there-”

“And who says this has anything to do with it?” Dean snaps.

“The witnesses who’ve sighted something with a human face and a shiny green body, that’s who,” Bobby fires back.

“Never heard of anything like that,” Sam says uneasily.

“Neither had I, so I been doing some research- about the only thing I can do these days.” Sam and Dean look at each other, worried. There were some things they just didn’t talk about, topics that were off limits to hunters as a whole. Bobby’s injury fell under that umbrella; every hunter knew it could happen to them someday, that the likely alternative was dying bloody. But that didn’t make what had happened any easier, or Bobby’s reaction any less troubling.

“Bobby, you’re not useless,” Sam says finally, after a pause that is both too long and too awkward.

Bobby’s humph makes it clear he is far from convinced. “Anyways,” he says when the silence threatens to well up again, “There’s a reason why we haven’t heard of anything like this. Sounds like he’s only showed up for the big finale. I’ve got an obscure version of Revelation that talks about ‘quae ascendit de abysso creaturae’, the creature that rises from the pit. Checks all the boxes and only shows up at the End of Days to give people Hell. So you boys gonna go look into it?”

“We’re already working, Bobby,” Dean says snappishly at the same time Sam begins asking “Do you have any more leads?” Dean glares at his brother.

“Cas’s curse?” Bobby asks.

“Yeah.” Dean’s jaw juts, defiant.

“You got anything on that?”

“We’re looking. We’ll find something soon enough.”

Bobby’s “maybe” sounds skeptical. Sam doubts it would be if he could see Dean’s face. “Don’t get me wrong, boys,” he says, voice crackling into the dusty air of the motel room where Dean stands clenching his fists. “It just might be smarter to fight a few battles you know you can win.

“There’s an entire town on the line out in Easton, and a whole world ready to burn. We gotta choose our battles these days.”

“And you’re saying Cas is one we can’t win?” Dean barks.

“Dean, calm down.” Sam means what he’s saying, but he also wants his brother to just shut up. Bobby’s been through enough crap this year; he doesn’t need Dean pitching a fit at him for saying something that’s harsh, but entirely reasonable.

“Don’t tell me to calm down.” Dean’s eyes flash as he looks from the phone to Sam. “And don’t say we should give up on Cas, either.”

“No one’s saying you have to do that,” Bobby says. “I’m just saying don’t be an idjit about it.”

“And what does that mean, anyways?” Dean’s voice rises until he is almost shouting. “Wait until there’s nothing big on the horizon? The Apocalypse is here. That’s never going to happen.”

“What that means is don’t go running around like a chicken with its head cut off. You aren’t going to help anyone that way- not Cas and not the poor schmucks who’ve had a gateway to the underworld open up in their backyards. You help who you can and you wait til you’ve got some leads.”

“And how’s that supposed to happen, huh? Oh, hold on, I’ve got it: some fairy’s gonna drop the answer right in my lap. Or maybe it’ll be the good angel!”

“Dammit, Dean, I’m on your side here.” Bobby is clearly running out of patience.

“You’ve got a funny way of-”

“-try to get in touch with some contacts who actually have a clue what the hell they’re doing.” The two men are shouting on top of each other now. Sam winces and rubs the bridge of his nose. Dean and Bobby are giving him a headache.

“The boat’s sinking, and we can’t bail fast enough, so it doesn’t matter what I do. I’m not going to walk out on Cas now. Go call someone else.” Dean grabs the phone and slams it shut so forcefully that Sam worries he might have broken it.

  


Castiel walks toward the diner, leaning heavily on his cane. Dean takes his other arm. Sam’s cane was a good idea, but it’s just not enough anymore.

“There’s a step up,” Dean says, quietly enough that only Castiel can hear. “You ready?”

Castiel nods, but does not speak. Walking takes up most of his energy and concentration.

Across the parking lot, a girl gets out of her car. She’s young, in her twenties, and her brown hair is pulled back in a ponytail. Under other circumstances, Dean might have considered flirting with her, but she is staring openly at Castiel, features soft with pity. Dean’s jaw clenches, and he tugs on Cas’s arm, hurrying him on before he can notice. Not that he would care if he did, but even two weeks ago the occasional person who could see a bit more than the material would gaze at Castiel in awe, and Dean’s stomach clenches when he thinks of the damage Heaven’s done.

  


A few days later, as they are finishing packing up the Impala, Sam’s phone rings.

“Hello?” he says, picking it up automatically.

“Uh, Sam.” It’s Bobby. He sounds uncomfortable.

"What’s going on? Do you need anything?” Sam wishes he could take the words back as soon as they are out of his mouth; the last thing Bobby wants is to be seen as helpless or dependent.

But for once the old hunter doesn’t seem to notice. “Actually, I called to- How’s Dean?”

Sam winces, and tries to come up with something to say. Dean drives like he’s spent forty years in the desert and still can’t see the River Jordan. Hope and despair alternate over his face with the patches of light and dark when they pass along a leafy stretch of road. Sometimes his eyes strain toward the horizon as though he’s trying to distinguish mirage from reality. “About the same,” he says finally.

“Balls,” Bobby says softly, and Sam is surprised by how much meaning he manages to infuse in that one brief, expletive: _I’m sorry you have to deal with this wreck, I love you, I wish I could fix this, don’t let Dean do anything stupid_. “Tell him I said I’ll let you know when I find something.”

“Thanks, Bobby,” Sam says.

  


Dean drives.

Something’s bound to come up. Something always does.

Dean learns to look for motel rooms on the first floor (Cas can’t do stairs), with just a shower, no bath (Cas stumbles over the edge), and which sleep three (they don’t want to be separated).

Somehow, they loop back around and find themselves in Massachusetts, at the archives of the Massachusetts State Historical Society.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for swearing, discussions of disability, discussions about death, mentions of illness, positive feelings about religion, references to sex, and mentions of bears and snakes.


	7. Ye Shall Find

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Angels were made to serve the divine. We could sense it. And now- now I can’t. I am sorry. I am no angel.”

  


Dean turned the page. The thick paper was oily from nearly two centuries of curious readers, and the book smelled of must. It was also the most promising book they had yet found.

Or it could be, if Ezra Peakes had done anything that might actually attract Heaven’s attention. Being an _Accounte of the Final Days of Ezra Peakes, Who Was an Affront unto God_ was, according to the preface, the history of “a dreadful Blasphemer and his dreadful End” as well as the finest work of the Puritan preacher Jobias Barebone. But one of the few academic things Dean had learned in high school was that prefaces always lied. So far he hadn’t seen anything that would make a decent ghost, let alone attract the wrath of Heaven.

“These Puritans were a bunch of prudes,” Dean complained. “So a guy sleeps with a few indentured servants. So what?” Dean turned the page, handling it a bit more roughly than was necessary in his frustration. “Urgh. That’s disgusting. Oh God, there’s a picture. They _illustrated_ it.”

Both Sam and Castiel looked up from their books, Dean’s exclamation of disgust having drawn their attention.

“No, Cas, don’t look,” Dean said hastily, half closing the cover as Castiel turned toward him.

Sam got up and stood behind Dean so he could see the book over his shoulder. “It’s not _that_ bad,” he said. “According to the 1953 Kinsey Report, over half of farm boy’s first sexual experiences were with livestock.”

“Why do you even know that?” Dean demanded, face contorted with disgust. “No, never mind, I don’t want to-”

“I took a gender and sexuality course in college,” Sam said.

“Sure you did,” Dean muttered, still staring in horror at the offending page.

Sam headed back to his own mountain of books. “Haven’t you been staring at that long enough?” he teased.

“Shut up,” Dean muttered, but turned the page.

Dean kept reading- well, scanning really; there were some things about Ezra Peakes he simply did not want to know. But if a guy was sick enough to do something like that, the odds were higher he might have gotten into the kind of stuff that would legitimately piss Heaven off.

“Huh,” he said about half an hour later. “Looks like Ezra Peakes was a witch.”

“Dude.” Sam rolled his eyes. “Everyone the Puritans didn’t like was a witch.”

“No, I mean, like, seriously.” Dean held out the book. “Look at some of the stuff they found in his house.”

Sam leaned forward, then reconsidered. “Do I really want to see it?”

“No, it’s legit witch stuff. Look, I’ll show Cas.

“Hey, Cas, over here.” Dean jabbed the book at Castiel until the fallen angel looked over at it.

“That is equipment of the sort used in the blackest magics mortals can perform,” Castiel agreed. “Though I do not recognize the third item from the left. Perhaps it was included by mistake?”

“More likely Jobias Barebone had no idea what he was talking about and just got lucky,” Dean said.

“What do you mean by ‘blackest magics’?” Sam asked.

“Spells that seek to plumb both Heaven and Hell, draining them of power to strengthen the caster. Attempts to open doors that it would be best to leave closed,” Castiel said tersely.

“So stuff that would put a major wrench in the angels’ plans?” Dean asked.

Castiel nodded, jaw tense. For a moment his posture was again that of the soldier, but his eyes were shadowed by doubt rather than lit by faith.

Dean regretted bringing the topic up. There was already enough suck in Castiel’s life these days without directly reminding him of the crap Heaven had been pulling for the last couple of millennia.

He picked up the book again. He didn’t think he’d find an answer there; the Puritans had had no desire to save Ezra Peakes; they’d just documented his death. But maybe there was a clue that would let them find the answer.

  


_In that first Week, our fellow Settlers indeed suspected that the Lord God had brought Castigation upon that vile Sinner within our midst, Ezra Peakes. Yet there was much Dread amongst our People, for fear that God had, by the emergence of a Plague, brought Destruction upon his Saints for their Failure to deal properly with the miserable Peakes. But it soon became apparent that Our Lord, in his infinite Mercy, had seen fit to merely remove the single Stain from the white Cloth which is our Settlement. That Ezra Peake’s Death was due to divine Providence is an incontrovertible Fact, for it was preceded by no known Illness, but rather a sort of Fading that could be considered comparable to a premature Senescence_ ….

Dean scanned over the description: Ezra Peakes stumbling, swooning, losing strength and energy day by day, but it was hard to feel as bad for him as he did for Cas. If Cas was right, Peakes had been doing the “destroy the world if you screw it up” kind of magic, and while he hated to side with Heaven, it was easy to think maybe they had made the right call here. 

… _And it came to pass that Ezra Peakes ceased to do his wicked Deeds, the Strength he had so badly used being taken from him by God. And even the few Activities of industry he had on occasion or of necessity taken it upon himself to do fell unattended as his Thews failed him. It was at that time that Goodman Fields and Goodwife Kent, showing the mercy of God’s chosen People, took upon themselves the Burden of attending to Ezra Peakes. It must be noted at this time that Peakes, though much diminished, was still utterly irascible, and_ …

Dean skipped the next few paragraphs. He had no desire to read another thousand words of Jobias self-righteously yammering about how great the Puritans were. Another section caught his eye.

_In the Week that was to prove Peake’s last, Goodwife Kent observed that he ceased to rail against his just Fate. Whether this evidences Peakes’ ultimate acceptance of divine Judgment or but foreshadows his final Decline is left to the Reader to decide. As has been described throughout this Account, as the weight of God’s judgment pressed more heavily upon Peakes, he faltered to a greater extent, presenting an image that in other circumstances would be an accomplished Portrait of the Sin of Sloth. In the final Portion of his miserable Life, this State became such that he rose not from his Bed, and from the Sixth of November onward, neither opened his Eyes nor spoke nor gave any Sign of awareness. Ezra Peakes persisted in this state for three Dayes, until the Evening of the Ninth of November, when the Lord God pronounced His final Judgment and Peakes breathed his last._

Dean stared down at the page. The rest of it was blank. That was it, it was over? Dean wasn’t an idiot; he had known what was going to happen from the moment he read the title, but he still instinctively turned the pages. A preachy afterword, blank pages at the end. Nothing. He tried to imagine the same thing happening to Cas, but it felt so jarringly wrong as to be unreal. He had the whole scenario written out for him and he still couldn’t picture it. Cas was an angel; he wasn’t supposed to just fade away. If Cas was going to go, he would go down in a fight, surrounded by powerful enemies. No, that wasn’t right either. Dean couldn’t picture Castiel falling beneath a tide of foes. He couldn’t imagine Cas dying. He didn’t want him to die. _He didn’t want him to die._

“Dude, you alright?” Sam whispered. “You look like what most people mean when they talk about seeing a ghost.”

Dean was suddenly aware that he had been sitting stock still, staring at the white page. “I’m fine,” he said dismissively, aware it was probably unconvincing.

Sam frowned at him for a minute, then apparently decided to let it go. Dean was glad. He was not up for an argument right now, and there was no way in Hell he was going to explain he was freaking out about Cas because of a seventeenth century dead guy.

“I don’t know if it’s anything. It’s probably garbage, but it might be something. Here, just look.” Sam slid the book across the table to Dean.

“It’s from a collection of nineteenth century Spiritualist pamphlets,” he explained as Dean scanned the page and glanced over the woodcuts. “We don’t know who wrote this one, or exactly when it was published, but we can sort of guess based on the content and formatting.”

“Sam?” Dean looked up from the page. “I don’t care. Shut up.”

Dean was inclined to agree with Sam’s assessment of the text as “garbage.” The Victorians didn’t capitalize every noun, but their language was so flowery, it was just as incomprehensible as the Puritans. Besides, Dean thought bitterly, the “Measure for Restoration in Times of Greatest Desperation” had probably been intended for situations a lot less desperate than these. It didn’t get much worse than facing down the end of the world with all of Heaven pissed at you. Still, though, after twenty years of hunting, one started to get an intuition for this kind of stuff. A lot of what Mr. Pickwick was prattling on about- “the sacred height” and “the holy of holies”- sounded like so much nonsense, but there was a sort of cadence behind the words that suggested that maybe, just maybe, the proposed ritual was groping blindly towards something real. Or maybe Dean was seeing things that weren’t there, because anything was better than the image of Castiel fading away.

“It’s crap, isn’t it?” Sam asked when Dean looked up from the book.

“Maybe, maybe not. Who knows,” he said dismissively. “It’s all we’ve got so far. Might want to check it out with Bobby.”

“You could call him yourself,” Sam said, uncomfortable with the divide that had opened between Bobby and his brother since their conversation in Minnesota. He was willing to bridge the gap, but wanted them to stop shuffling around each other and return to their normal relationship. Family was about all they’d got left now.

“Your book, your problem,” Dean brushed him off dismissively.

  


The small round table was strewn with books and scraps of paper that were covered with untidy scrawls. Sam’s laptop sat in the center of the mess, fourteen tabs open. His cell phone lay a little to the right, perched on top of a pile of books. It was almost like old times. Almost, except for the angelic eyes boring a hole in the back of his head. Sometimes it seemed like Cas was almost getting the whole being human thing. Other times, like now, he seemed impossibly alien, and Sam doubted anyone would ever mistake him for someone normal.

But that wasn’t the primary concern right now.

“Does it seem, I don’t know, Jewish to you?” Sam asked. He’d spent the last half hour on the phone, trying to trace the origins of the pamphlet he’d found at the Massachusetts Historical Society, a task that seemed increasingly futile as the evening wore on.

“More like Gnostic?” Bobby’s voice reverberated through the tinny speakers.

The door swung open as Dean walked into the room. “Who’s talking about Italian food?” he demanded of the room at large. “Man, am I hungry.”

Sam’s sigh of frustration harmonized with Bobby’s exasperated groan, and Dean grinned from ear to ear. Sam felt himself relax more than he had in days. It was almost the way their crazy, messed up lives were supposed to be.

“I’ll look into it, make some calls,” Bobby promised, and Sam felt more tension disappear from his spine, because this was what Bobby was supposed to say. He was supposed to grumble about the favors he would have to cash in (as Sam distantly heard him doing), and complain about the difficulty of procuring rare books (not that Sam had ever seen that stop him before), but he wasn’t supposed to decry himself as helpless, and Sam felt grateful when he didn’t, because maybe now, at the end of the world, they were learning to live with what was.

But still, not everything was right, so Sam heard himself asking Bobby to hurry, saying he didn’t think they had much time.

As soon as he ended the call, he was aware of Dean glaring at him.

“What?” he asked wearily. (He’d enjoyed that little oasis.)

“You’ve gotta stop being such a pessimist,” Dean said angrily.

This was so unlike Dean that Sam momentarily wondered if he’d been replaced by a shifter who’d failed acting school.

“What?” he said stupidly.

“You’re being way too negative.” Dean eyes weren’t quite fixed on Sam. His gaze kept darting off to the side, toward the part of the room where Cas lay on one of the queen beds. “We’ve finally got a legit lead. We’re gonna beat this.”

Now it was Sam’s turn to look at Cas. Either he wasn’t listening, or he was making a very convincing show of ignoring them, and given Castiel’s track record at acting and social graces in general, Sam suspected the former.

“Dean, you know how many false leads we have whenever we research something. And it’s taken us two weeks just to find this.”

Dean looked stony and unconvinced.

Sam sighed and continued, dropping his voice. “I’m just trying to be realistic, Dean. Cas has lost a lot of ground. Do you really think a month was reasonable estimate?”

Dean glared so fiercely that, for a moment, Sam felt like the smaller brother. “We’ll find a way,” he said. His tone, like John’s at his most combative, booked no argument. He turned and stalked out, leaving his brother shaking his head in confusion at his alternation between fatalism and defiance.

  


When Dean returned several hours later, he was toting the biggest pizza Sam had ever seen: dinner and a mute request to ignore their earlier argument. Sam accepted both.

“So,” Sam said around a mouthful of melty, gooey cheese. He didn’t care that Dean hadn’t brought a salad; he was starving. “I think I’ve figured out who wrote that pamphlet from the Historical Society: Giles Drummond. It seems like he was kind of a kook.”

“Kook’s never mattered to us before.” It was amazing how derisive Dean could sound with his mouth full of Meat Lover’s Special.

Sam stared at him for a few seconds, temporarily baffled, before he realized this was another of the abrupt, contradictory changes of opinion his brother had manifested in the past week.

“Well, uh, Drummond had this sort of newsletter, the Periodical for the Intellectually Curious.” Sam tried to respect his brother’s obvious wishes, and let this new shift in opinion go unmentioned, but he wished he could just talk to Dean, ask him what was going on. But while he was making wishes like that, he might as well hope the angels decided to call off the Apocalypse. “I’ve found an online archive of the surviving copies, and in one, in the letter section, someone writes ‘I find your description of the power that radiates from the pinnacle of the holy of holies most fascinating, but remain curious as to the source and nature of that emanation.’” Sam braced himself for his brother to take any of several opportunities to make a derisive remark or crack a lewd joke, but Dean was so full of faith or desperation or some other emotion Sam couldn’t name that he simply motioned for Sam to continue.

“So Drummond answers him,” Sam said, aware that his voice sounded hesitant and unsteady, but he couldn’t control it, because this was a side to Dean he had never seen before, had never imagined existed, and he felt like a starving man was asking him for a piece of bread when all he had to offer was a stale fat-free soda cracker. “By saying that ‘the power is not easily comprehensible to those still fettered by the chains of the flesh. Only to those who are of the spirit, and see by the light of the spirit may both source and nature be made manifest.’” Sam rolled his eyes at the flowery prose, and expected to see Dean do the same, but he was staring at him in rapt attention that nearly rivaled the intensity of the look he was getting from Cas. Sam had the unpleasant sensation that he was missing something big. It wasn’t a feeling he often had, but maybe that just made it worse. Sam took a deep breath and continued. “It is a wellspring, and yet it is a mere outflowing and not the source. It is a light, and yet it is a shadow...’ He goes on like this for paragraphs, and at the end he says ‘It is through the truth that you would seek redemption, and yet through but an echo of the truth.’” Sam shook his head in disgust. “Sorry, Dean, but I have no idea what you could possibly get out of this. The more I research it, the more it feels like it’s just nonsense.”

Dean didn’t answer, just sat there with his fists clenched and a look of betrayal on his face that made Sam’s stomach twist.

“No.” The word was clear and ringing, holding all of the power and confidence of the ancient “Be not afraid.” 

Sam turned, and was surprised to see that Castiel was speaking, even though of course it was Cas, it had to be Cas, he and Dean and himself were the only people in the room.

Castiel stared at him with a blazing intensity that made Sam flinch, made some primal part of him cringe away from a source of great power, until the illusion was spoiled by the fine tremor that ran the length of Cas’s body as he lay on the sagging mattress, propped on one elbow and almost translucently pale.

“Giles Drummond speaks the truth.” Then the fire went out and Castiel was just a man again, tired and weak and dying. “Or close to it.”

“What do you mean?” Sam asked, almost reverently. He was still unsettled by the brief reappearance of Castiel’s angelic nature, and something between awe and fear quivered in his chest.

“If God exists,” Castiel said. “He would have left marks on His creation- echoes- at important sites.”

“What, like the Grand Canyon or Mount Everest?” Dean asked.

Castiel shook his head. “I do not think so. The sites where an echo might form would be of more than physical significance: where a nation was damned, where a people was saved.”

“So we need to find freakin’ Gomorrah?” Dean looked seriously disconcerted, and Sam couldn’t blame him.

“No,” Castiel said harshly.

“Because?” Dean prompted when it seemed Castiel intended to say nothing more on the subject.

“Because Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed on Michael’s orders, not God’s, and because it was Uriel, not God, who wrought the primary part of the devastation,” Castiel said, his voice rough and abrupt, as though he were impatiently reiterating an explanation the Winchesters should already know. “Besides, the echo is not the whole.The whole of God displays an infinite variety of emotions, from boundless mercy to wrath beyond comprehension.”

“So God’s off his meds, huh?” There was that casually sarcastic quip Sam had been missing.

“God is inviolate,” Castiel shot back, apparently having understood the gist of Dean’s comment.

“Gimme that,” Dean muttered, grabbing Sam’s laptop and pulling it toward himself.

“He is far more complex than any lesser being can comprehend,” Castiel continued, completely ignoring the frantic clicking of the keyboard as Dean typed “inviolate” into the search engine. “Even echo- echo is not the right word. Perhaps facet?”

“What do you mean?” Sam asked. Dean was multi-tasking, reading an entry in an online dictionary, and Sam wasn’t sure how much attention he was paying.

“An echo- an echo fades away, and is not connected to the whole. A facet- it is part of the whole, but you cannot understand the whole through the facet.”

“Ok…” Sam said slowly. He was pretty sure he understood the analogy, but Cas seemed confused and flustered, as though he knew he were missing something.

“But that- that is not adequate.” Castiel shook his head in consternation. “The Facet will fade away unless it is reinforced by the Whole, and yet it feeds the Whole, and as long as the Facet exists, so also does the Whole...I cannot explain it.

“Let me try again.” There was a long pause while Castiel groped for an explanation. His brow was at first furrowed with concentration, but desperation gradually blossomed in his eyes. It was the face of a man who has walked into the office where he had worked every day for the last thirty five years only to realize his papers were not where he had put them, his phone was on the opposite side of the desk, the desk itself was the wrong color and shape and weight; that, in fact, this was not his office at all, that he had never been here before. “There is a well- no, a tree- no...

“Even angels cannot fully grasp the nature of God. Humans can understand even less. God is infinite, angels are nearly immortal, and humans are so small.” Castiel frowned down at himself- the narrow chest, the thin arms- as though they were a personal affront. “I can grasp so much less than I once could. It is as though a sense has been darkened.” Castiel looked from Sam to Dean, who was now paying full attention. Something like desperation burned in Cas’s eyes. “Like hearing, perhaps. You do not realize it is gone until you listen and there is only silence. And- it is more than that. Even the memories are becoming indistinct. It is as though they are too big to grasp.

“Angels were made to serve the divine. We could sense it. And now- now I can’t. I am sorry. I am no angel.” Castiel looked defeated. The brothers sat in silence, not knowing what to say.

“It is as though there is a rose,” Castiel said at last, quietly, hesitantly.

“But of the rose the stem.” Sam completed the line on instinct, in a hushed whisper.

A faint light kindled in Castiel’s eyes, an expression that was almost hope. “Yes- the stem feeds the rose, but the stem twines back into the rose…” His voice trailed off, and Sam and Cas stared, not at each other, but rather at the concept that hung nebulously in the air between them, just on the edge of conscious expression.

Dean looked from his brother to his angel, bewildered. “So… we’re looking for God?” he asked finally.

Castiel nodded, eyes still focused on something unseen, and Dean swallowed, feeling a knot form in his belly, a knot that had nothing to do with the five slices of greasy pizza he had just devoured.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for swearing, mentions of death, a less than PC mention of mental illness and lewd remarks, including mentions of bestiality.


	8. Where Lies the Road to Gilead?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You used to pray to the angels. Before we raised Dean. Before you knew we existed.” It was a series of statements, flat, rough and pure Cas. But it demanded an answer, so much so that Sam suspected Castiel was starting to learn some of the subtleties of human social interaction.  
> “How did you know?” It was a natural response, not a calculated one. Now that Sam had met angels, he found it easy to believe that they were deaf to prayers, and the idea that all of his heartfelt pleas had gone unheard was more comforting than the other possibility.  
> “Angels can hear prayers,” Castiel said flatly, gruffly. His tone softened as he added “I… we weren’t allowed to do anything. I’m sorry.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Valentine's Day, all! Regardless of your relationship status or feelings about romance, the following is very important information: Last year fancy chocolates were cheapest two days after Valentine's Day. May you have the best day and as many chocolates as you want!

  


It wasn’t that the feeling of treading close to something sacrosanct, something vast and old and faintly luminous had vanished when morning came, it was just that it felt wrong to speak of it in the daylight, the same kind of wrongness that kept Sam from mentioning his dreams of Lucifer, that kept them all from talking about Castiel’s fading strength.

Sam could hear the shower hissing through the thin walls as he peered into the chipped mirror, trying to make his hair cooperate. Dean, as usual, was proving to be the king of long showers, but it wasn’t like they could ever get out the door quickly these days. Castiel sat on the edge of the bed, looking like he was about to overbalance and fall on his face as he struggled with his shoes. Sam resisted the compulsion to help him. It was better to pretend he didn’t notice and let Cas keep his dignity. He was, in fact, putting so much effort into not noticing Cas that he was startled when he suddenly spoke.

“You used to pray to the angels. Before we raised Dean. Before you knew we existed.” It was a series of statements, flat, rough and pure Cas. But it demanded an answer, so much so that Sam suspected Castiel was starting to learn some of the subtleties of human social interaction.

“How did you know?” It was a natural response, not a calculated one. Now that Sam had met angels, he found it easy to believe that they were deaf to prayers, and the idea that all of his heartfelt pleas had gone unheard was more comforting than the other possibility.

“Angels can hear prayers,” Castiel said flatly, gruffly. His tone softened as he added “I… we weren’t allowed to do anything. I’m sorry.”

“Why are you asking about this now?” Sam was genuinely puzzled.

Castiel answered his question with one of his own: “Did you ever doubt that we existed?”

Sam felt his ears heat up. “Uh, yeah. I guess I did.

“Lots of times,” he added awkwardly.

Castiel did not look affronted, only quiet and grave and inscrutable.

“I mean, uh, you never did anything,” Sam was aware that he was babbling, but he couldn’t seem to stop; it seemed horrifically offensive to have doubted the existence of the solid, real being in front of him, the being who was fully prepared to die out sheer devotion to him and his brother. “And Dad and Dean didn’t believe you existed…” He sought to offer some excuse, no matter how pathetic, for his embarrassing lack of faith.

“And yet, you continued praying…” Castiel murmured so quietly Sam could barely hear him. Then, in a louder voice, he asked “And when our existence was revealed to you?”

Sam sighed and turned away from the mirror. It was a genuine question and deserved a genuine answer. “I was pretty shocked,” he admitted. “And kind of hurt.

“I know it wasn’t your fault,” he added quickly. “But there were so many times you could have helped.”

Castiel nodded gravely. “I see. It is one of the things I have always admired about humanity: their ability to remain faithful, even though we have given them so little cause for faith. Angels were created to remain faithful, but we have failed. 

“Sometimes I- I have doubted my Father’s Will and Intent.

“Sometimes even His existence,” he added in a scarcely audible mumble.

Castiel looked up at Sam, his deep blue eyes sad and pleading. “I could not bear to approach Him, or even a facet of His Being still wearing that stain. And seeking aid from such a position-” Castiel shuddered convulsively, a motion that had nothing to do with the perpetual chill that now gripped him. “I would like to… remind myself of faith as it should be. Do you believe it would be possible to-” Sam had never seen Castiel ask for anything, and could see that he was struggling to now. “- attend a church service?” he finished in a sort of desperate rush, staring up at Sam with meltingly sad eyes as though he considered his request excessive and expected it to be bluntly rejected.

Sam had no choice but say yes.

  


“Why does he want to go to church?” Dean asked again as he leaned back against the Impala, arms crossed over his chest.

“Because he thinks it will affirm his faith or something.” Sam felt uncomfortable restating all the details of his conversation with Castiel, and he was getting tired of Dean’s constant demands for an explanation. “How’s this different than the gospel music?” he wheedled.

Dean’s glare told him he had just made a mistake. “Because I’m not stuck with it for two hours straight,” he snarled. “And I don’t have to put on a damn suit to listen to my own radio.”

Sam rolled his shoulders and frowned. Dean often wore a suit when they investigated cases, and he never regarded it as more than a mild inconvenience. Sam wanted to ask him what his problem actually was, but that was tantamount to binding raw steaks to his legs and wading into a pool of piranhas. Sam definitely wasn’t that stupid.

Dean pretended not to notice Sam’s discomfort. Sure, he’d wanted to find something, a ritual or a spell that would break the curse, but this was obvious horse crap. Find God? Cas, the poor sucker, only believed it would work because he wanted it to. Sam believed it as far as he did because he was, to be completely honest, a hopeless romantic. And even if God was out there- a possibility Dean ranked with his odds of winning the lotto or getting through the Apocalypse without massive loss of human life- the douchebag didn’t deserve so much as a single ‘hallelujah’. The thought of spending two full hours praising him about made him puke.

Rather than admit that, Dean said “We’re supposed to be rescuing Zelda, not exploring the freaking village.”

Sam’s eyebrows arched. “You just called Cas a girl. And a princess.”

“If you and Cas are even close to right about this ritual, it’s bigger than finding the Triforce. That’s way more important than planting some pumpkins or whatever.”

Dean was demonstrating the convenient deafness he sometimes developed, particularly when Sam suggested a particularly unappealing case or begged for the off-tune Led Zeppelin renditions to stop. Sam knew from long experience that it was useless to try to pursue the point when he got like this, so instead he asked “How much can we really do in two hours? On a Sunday? Everything will be closed.”

“Internet’s still open,” Dean responded stubbornly.

“There’s a good collection of Gnostic resources at the University of the District of Columbia. I think that’s our best chance of finding anything.”

“Can’t we look up more stuff about that Giles Drummond guy?” Dean demanded.

“Everything I’ve found for the last twelve hours has been a repeat of something we already know, and it seems like the ritual is the only potentially useful thing he ever wrote about,” Sam explained wearily.

“We just need to look harder,” Dean countered stubbornly.

“Dean.” Sam tried to sound stern to counter his brother’s irrational stubbornness, but at the same time he felt awful for what he was about to say. Dean was determined that they would save Cas, unwilling to even consider the possibility of defeat. “If we don’t do this, I don’t think Cas will be willing to go along with the ritual.”

An eddy of dust blew along the edge of the parking lot, but the breeze was too faint to lessen the sense of heaviness in the steadily warming air.

When Dean spoke, it was with forced humor stretched unconvincingly over hollowness. “Never read anything that said he had to want to go along with it. We could just drag him.”

Sam had long ago given up on trying to match wits with his brother, and he didn’t want to compete to see who was the better liar, so he simply said “It’s two hours. And it will make him happy.”

The silence dragged on as he watched the drifts of dust spiral around the asphalt.

“It always sucks wearing a suit in this weather.” Dean was staring at the dust too, not looking at Sam. “And ties make it, like, ten times worse.”

Sam said nothing. Trying to persuade his brother was often counterproductive.

“It’s the stupidest thing we’ve ever done-” (Sam doubted that.) “-but fine, we’ll go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No content warnings for this chapter!


	9. Churched

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean thought that this must be the sort of angel that Sam had imagined- not bloodthirsty like Uriel or manipulative like Zachariah, but beautiful.

  


Dean pulled into the parking lot of The Sacred Lamb of Madison. “Are you sure we want to do this?” he asked, addressing the occupants of the car in general. “It’s just a few hours to D.C. By the time we get there, the strip clubs will be open.” Sam started to say something, but Dean cut him off. “We can choose a real classy one, bust out the good credit cards. Maybe there’ll be a senator or something there, so Cas can get a little civics education, too. What do you think?” Dean beamed, glancing around the car to assess the others’ reactions.

Sam fixed him with a withering glare, and Cas wilted in the backseat, looking so disconsolate that Dean felt like the world’s biggest jerk.

“Or... I guess not” Dean looked miserably at the reflection of the church in his rearview mirror and tugged at his uncomfortable necktie.

  


Even with Dean on one side and his cane on the other, Castiel’s steps were tiny, their progress painfully slow. Dean scowled at the pitying glances from elderly women. Why had he parked so far away from the church?

As the front of the church came into view, Dean’s internal mantra of expletives slid a little closer to becoming external. There were stairs. Stairs and a ramp. Stairs were a nightmarish invention, as far Dean was concerned anymore. Cas would struggle to clear each step. The ramp was in some sense easier because of its gentle incline, but it was long, and that meant more steps. Each step took something out of Castiel, something that was never really replaced, no matter how much he rested.

Stairs or ramp? One tiny step closer.

Ramp or stairs? Another step.

About five feet before the first concrete step, Dean made his decision. He wasn’t sure Cas could even make it up the stairs upright. He steered toward the ramp.

Fortunately, there was an empty pew near the back of the church. Fewer steps, and fewer steps past church people. They were smiling at them, but probably because they were supposed to smile. Probably they were actually wondering what these freaks were doing in their church. Dean steered Cas towards to the pew, looking as dignified as he could. No church ladies’ gossip was going to bother _him_. Sam, who had kept pace with their slow procession, slid into the pew beside Cas. Dean was glad he wasn’t insisting they find a spot closer to the front. Maybe Sam was just as uncomfortable as he was. The thought was strangely reassuring.

Dean looked at the sea of silver and white and groaned internally. It wasn’t like he had been counting on flirting his way through the service; church girls, in general, weren’t just _playing_ hard to get. He’d only wanted something interesting to look at. But he Sam, and Cas were about the only people here under the age of sixty. Dean slouched in the pew. It was going to be a long two hours.

Sam and Cas glared at him. This time, Dean actually did sigh. But puppy eyes and bitchface weren’t the only expressions Sam had mastered; he could also look pretty damn reproachful when he wanted to, and Cas had apparently been taking lessons. Dean sat up a bit straighter.

The murmur of old friends catching up on the week’s news was replaced by congregational silence at the first peal of notes from the massive pipe organ. A short, balding man in white robes made his way up the aisle, followed by a barely adolescent boy carrying a small carved cross on a long pole. A girl, still pudgy with baby fat, carried what looked like a fancy bronze shepherd’s crook, although the small flame at the top told Dean it was some sort of ceremonial lighter.

The processional’s last throbbing note faded away as the priest stepped behind the pulpit and bent the microphone stalk down so it was at the appropriate height for his mouth. “Brothers and sisters in Christ,” he announced in a high, reedy voice. “The Gathering Song is Number 110 in the purple book.”

There was a general rustle as parishioners bent forward to retrieve hymnals from the wooden baskets attached to the back of each pew. Sam and Dean glanced at each other in dismayed confusion. There was one book that might conceivably be called purple- that is, the border around the stylized illustration was purple, but the majority of the cover was red, as it was dominated by an image of red robed people singing or praising or something. And Number 110? Did the pastor mean page 110?

“Here you go, dears,” the woman in the pew in front of them turned around, offering them a hymnal open to the correct page.

Dean’s “Thank you” was genuine, though the last syllable may have been swallowed up by the pastor’s amplified “All who are able, please rise,” and Sam and Dean’s subsequent, simultaneous grabs at Castiel’s shoulders to keep him in his seat.

The next half hour was as boring as Dean had feared. He fidgeted, tugged at his collar, shifted in his seat, and scuffed his dress shoes until Sam gave him a look that indubitably promised death unless he pulled it together. Castiel was too focused on the service to notice their silent squabbling. Dean wondered what he found to hold his attention. Angels were just weird.

Dean’s train of thought was broken by the pastor declaring that the Hymn of the Day would be Number 385 in the Green Book, verses one and two. _Crap_. Before he could get any farther than looking down at the basket of hymnals and realizing, yes, there was only one book that could be called green, the woman in front of him turned around, again offering him an open hymnal with a friendly smile.

Sam was still flipping through The Green Book, eyebrows knitting together as he proved unable to find the hymn, so Dean scooted closer to Cas and held the book out in front of his body so it was roughly in the middle of the three of them. “Hey- Sam,” he hissed. “Over here.”

Sam’s frown softened as he saw the book, and he mouthed “Thanks”, reaching out to support the book from the other side.

The first notes from the organ swelled, reverberating through the sanctuary, and the three men bent over the little book, reading the lyrics on the page:

_When I was sinking down,_

_When I was sinking down_

_Beneath God’s righteous frown,_

_Christ laid aside His crown for my soul for my soul,_

_Christ laid aside His crown for my soul._

Dean swallowed and glanced at Cas, suddenly uncomfortable.

_What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!_

_What wondrous love is this, O my soul!_

_What wondrous love is this_

_That caused the Lord of bliss_

_To bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul,_

_To bear the dreadful curse for my soul!_

Dean stared at Cas, open mouthed, as realization blossomed somewhere deep in his chest and slowly spread through his stomach and limbs, warming and glowing like a liquid fire. His mouth was hanging open, and awe and wonder were shining in his eyes, and even if he had realized it, he would have been unable to move, paralyzed by the revelation that opened like a rose within him.

Dean never was sure how long he had sat there before he realized he was, in fact, sitting in church gaping at a fallen angel, but the last notes of the hymn had died away, and the music he felt reverberating through his chest was not from the organ at all.

  


Later, after a sermon Dean didn’t listen to, wouldn’t have been able to if he’d tried, the organist rose from her bench and called the choir forward. There were no fancy robes or ornate updos. It wasn’t like the televised choral concert Dean had once stumbled on while he and Sam were working a case in Tennessee. The only things distinguishing them from the rest of the congregation were the worn songbooks they held. 

The first hymn they sang had a clear, simple tune, but the second rolled and swelled into a powerful wash of sound that reverberated through the small wood building, resonating through the congregation. Dean hadn’t expected them to be this good. He glanced around the sanctuary. Everyone was listening closely, and some parishioners looked transported, but none so much so as Cas. Castiel seemed transfixed; Dean doubted he could move if he wanted to, thought that the music had risen up around him like a sea and floated him off to some place Dean had never seen or even imagined. He was smiling, but not at anyone or thing Dean could see. He could only call his expression rapturous, and there seemed to be a sort of glow around his pale face.

Dean thought that this must be the sort of angel that Sam had imagined- not bloodthirsty like Uriel or manipulative like Zachariah, but beautiful. Distant and inaccessible, yes, but also calm and beautiful. When Dean thought about Castiel’s quest to find God, his insides still knotted up with a mixture of disgust and anger and revulsion, but when he looked at Cas, he knew they had done the right thing by coming here today.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for: discussion of disability and swearing.  
> Some of you may notice that the lyrics to What Wondrous Love Is This are in the reverse of their usual order. They work better that way, and there are some variants on the hymn, so let's just assume Sacred Lamb of Madison has a rather unique version.  
> Also, a reminder that this is Cheapest Chocolate Day!


	10. Through the Darkness Thy Face to See

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Does this word mean ceremonial or sacrificial?” Sam asked.  
> Castiel shrugged. “It depends on the context…”

  


It was Tuesday when Professors Carter, Herbert and Morton entered the library at the University of the District of Columbia.

“We were colleagues of the late Professor Walters,” Professor Herbert was explaining, leaning over the Information Desk.

Professor Carter grabbed Professor Morton’s elbow. He was starting to sway again. He had parked as close as he could and they probably hadn’t even been here for five minutes. It was getting worse every day. Back when he had still been known as Sam, Professor Herbert had said they didn’t have much time. Dean, now Professor Carter, had told him to shut up, but he was starting to admit he might be right.

“May I have your names, please?” The librarian asked.

Sam introduced them. The librarian’s brow momentarily creased, but she seemed to accept their identities. Better, Sam thought, than if they had gone with Dean’s first choice: Jones, Jones and Croft.

“How did you know Professor Walters again?” the librarian asked.

“We met at the annual L.A. conference when most of us were still grad students,” Sam replied smoothly. “After that, we’d meet up at least once a year to trade papers. We kept in contact off and on after he retired, and we were sad to hear he’d passed.”

The librarian was smiling a bit now. “Bernard’s work really was his passion. A lot of professors sort of forget about the library- they build up their own personal collections, but leave us on our own to figure out what the general student population should have access to. Bernard wasn’t like that. He was always making suggestions, looking for grants, even offering his own books. So we weren’t really surprised when he left us his books and manuscripts.” She nodded at the shelves over her shoulder.

Sam was great at the whole respectable professional act, and people, especially women, ate it up. Dean was proud of him and thought, if the world had been a bit different, he would have made a great lawyer. Still, he wasn’t going to let Sam do all of the talking. It was bad enough that one of the professors probably seemed to be mysteriously mute. “Actually, that’s why we’re here. We heard Professor Walters had some rare materials in his collection, and we thought maybe they could help us with some research we’ve been working on.” _Thank you, Bobby Singer, honorary doctorate in information acquisition, for that little tidbit._

“Of course.” The librarian bent down, hefting a large cardboard box from under the desk. She heaved it onto the the desktop, then said “We’ve only had Professor Walter’s collection for two months, and we haven’t cataloged it yet, so while I can let you look at it, nothing in this box can leave the library.”

“We understand,” Sam said, easily lifting the heavy box and turning towards an unoccupied table in the corner of the library.

Castiel slowly turned to follow him, and Dean paused, intending to let Cas get a few steps ahead of him, then bring up the rear. That way, if Cas was going to keel over again, he’d land on a Winchester no matter which way he fell.

But the librarian had stepped out from behind the curved information desk, and was tapping Dean’s shoulder.

“Excuse me,” she asked quietly, indicating Castiel with the point of her chin. “Is he alright?”

Dean felt a dull, red flush creep up his cheeks. He’d gotten used to the stares- he hated them, but they were normal now- but this was the first time a stranger had outright asked him if Cas was OK.

“He’s fine,” Dean wanted to snap. “Now back off and mind your own business.” But one look at Cas- pale, unsteady Cas- and he knew that that lie wouldn’t hold.

“No,” Dean admitted. Then, aware of the woman still hovering by his elbow, he added “He has leukemia.” The librarian clearly wanted details, and it was the only condition he could think of on such short notice that would explain Cas’s appearance.

The woman’s eyes widened and she clasped her hand over her mouth. “Oh, I’m so sorry!” she gasped. Maybe it was genuine pity. Maybe it was just the shock of a gossip who’d stumbled onto a particularly juicy bit of information. Either way, Dean didn’t much care, and Professor Carter walked to the table in dignified silence.

  


“Son of a bitch,” Dean breathed, staring at the contents of the box. “Most of this isn’t even _English_.”

“He was a Coptologist,” Sam shrugged.

Dean felt a wave of frustration rush over him at Sam’s apparent calmness. “English, Sam, English. You are _supposed_ to speak English.”

“Bernard Walters studied the Coptic language and the associated period of Egyptian history,” Sam explained. “So it makes sense that a lot of his documents are in Coptic.”

“Great,” Dean muttered. “Does anyone here actually _speak_ Coptic?”

Sam fidgeted a little. “Remember that summer Dad left us with Bobby for two months so he could go work on a case?” he asked. “When you were fourteen and I was ten?”

“Yes,” Dean snapped. “It was stupid. I was plenty old enough to look after you. But what’s that got to do with anything?”

“Well, there’s not exactly a lot to do at Bobby’s…”

“Tell me about it,” Dean snorted. “He’s miles from town, we couldn’t go anywhere, there was nothing to do… I swear to God I rebuilt three transmissions that summer because I was so bored.

“But you were such a dork that you were totally into it. I think you spent the whole time in Bobby’s library reading those freaky old books.”

“Hey, don’t get me wrong.” Sam raised his hands in a pacifying gesture. “I was pissed about Dad ditching us, too. I just thought that reading was more interesting than spending two months sulking in the scrapyard.”

Dean scowled at his brother.

“Anyways, Bobby had an old Coptic grammar, and I spent most of the summer working on it. I think I remember most of it, so I might be able to read some of these papers.” Sam indicated the disorganized contents of the box.

“Coptic was a common human language at the time the angels retreated to Heaven,” Castiel remarked conversationally.

“Wait, does that mean you speak it too?” Dean demanded, starting to feel a bit left out.

Rather than answering, Castiel stared across the library and began to speak very slowly in a language that sounded rough and harsh- though that may have just been his pronunciation.

“Sam?” Dean whispered uncertainly. “Do you what he’s saying?”

Sam, brow furrowed with concentration, translated slowly. “As your fathers have sinned, so also have you, sinned without repentance and without ceasing. Thus shall the wrath of Heaven be visited upon you and a just punishment meted out.

“Then Uriel came down, glorious in his wrath, and smote them all, men and women and children and beasts of field and glade, and his sword was gleaming with the wrath of Heaven and red with anger and with blood…”

Dean looked at Castiel in alarm. The angel’s gaze was fixed on a distant point, and when Dean tried to follow it, he found himself looking at a patch of sunlight reflected off of the polished top of a table on the other side of the room. 

“Their lamentations went up without ceasing, and their wailing was without end…”

Castiel was speaking more rapidly now; Sam was struggling to keep up. His shoulders were shaking, and he still stared at the same distant spot.

“Cas,” Dean said quietly, then repeated himself, more insistently and harshly. “ _Cas_ ”.

Castiel gave no sign that he had heard.

“... And the sand grew red and heavy with the blood of…”

“Cas!” Dean grabbed Castiel’s shoulder. No response.

“Cas!” He tightened his grip on his shoulder, at first only pulling on the material of his jacket, then shaking him roughly. Castiel blinked, looking around the library in evident confusion.

“What the hell?” Sam murmured quietly, massaging the bridge of his nose.

Dean glared at the box. Any optimism he’d had about their discovery had suddenly vanished.

  


Several hours later, Dean hadn’t found much to restore his optimism.

“There are some really old papers here,” Sam said reverently once they’d gotten past the initial layer of detritus (mostly back issues of the Journal of Coptology). “This one is probably over five hundred years old,” he said, referring to the brittle piece of parchment in his hand. “It’s amazing that it survived the Middle Ages. It seems to be talking about Gnostic theology, and that was regarded as heretical by the Catholic Church, so they destroyed every document relating to Gnosticism they could find. This really should be in archival storage, not a cardboard box.” He glanced toward the information desk, still holding the parchment gingerly.

“No way,” Dean protested. “You get that box taken away, and we lose any chance we had of finding that ritual. Research first, then worry about putting everything in a museum.”

>Dean added another paper- a typewritten, heavily blotted draft of “Gender, Ethics, and Divine Emanations”- to the “Useless” pile. The box was a mess: priceless manuscripts lay under clipped journal articles, and Dean had found at least three stray receipts for coffee and bagels. To make matters worse, he was stuck with the English language documents, which meant articles talking about old Coptic documents, rather than the documents themselves. And since pretty much every Coptologist spoke Coptic, the articles frequently contained large blocks of untranslated material. Sometimes Dean could guess from context that it was irrelevant, but more often he had to hand the pages to Sam so his brother could laboriously parse a few sentences with the aid of a Coptic dictionary they had fortunately found in Professor Walters' collection and declare it irrelevant.

Cas would be able to translate faster, but both Sam and Dean were carefully avoiding asking him to do anything with the Coptic documents, not wanting to provoke a repeat of whatever the hell had happened earlier. But either he had been significantly less freaked out than them or- more likely, Dean thought, remembering how Castiel had been shaking when he had grabbed his shoulder- it took more than a few months of rebellion and falling to erase a sense of duty built up over millennia, because he was doggedly sorting through the vaguely Grecian-looking text.

Dean kept glancing over at him. Any sign of turning funny colors, or speaking in tongues, or vibrating like an overwrought engine on the point of explosion, and he didn’t care what anyone said, they were getting _out_ of here. But Cas looked fine- or as fine as he ever looked these days- so Dean didn’t exactly sigh with relief (that would have been damn noticeable in the quiet library), but he sure felt the tension leave his neck and shoulders.

In fact, Cas looked pretty absorbed in whatever he was reading, and Dean felt a sudden surge of hope. Maybe, out of the half a metric ton of papers they had moved since this entire mess had started, and the three reams they had sorted through today, maybe they had finally found something.

“Whatcha reading, Cas?” Dean asked, leaning in closer- a dumb move if he’d ever made one, because the scribbles on the page were still just gibberish.

“It is very fascinating,” Castiel said distractedly.

Dean suppressed the urge to roll his eyes. Angel or human, you couldn’t get a straight answer out of him. “Yeah, but what _is_ it?” he pressed. “Ignorant human, you know.”

Castiel looked up, brow still furrowed with concentration, the bags under his eyes making him- his body- look ten years older than it actually was. “It is… a collection of tax records,” he said finally. “From first-century Egypt. It is amazing, how carefully human rulers catalog their kingdoms. Almost like the hierarchy of the celestial order…”

Dean felt like he had been the very model of self control. Whatever crap had happened, he’d kept cool. But he had his limit, and this was it. Dean groaned aloud.

“Cas,” he said through gritted teeth. “We’re looking for stuff about the Ritual. The ritual that’s supposed to save your feathered ass. If it’s not about the Ritual, don’t bother reading it.”

“Uh, about that,” Sam said, clearly distracted from whatever he was reading by Dean’s aggravated lecture. “I think I might have found something.”

Dean whirled on him in an instant, barely restrained frustrations finding a new target. “Why didn’t you say something?” he demanded.

“Because I just figured it out now,” Sam said wearily. “Look, Dean, I hate to disappoint you, but my Coptic is about on the same level as my auto shop. It’s slow going. All I know is that this-” he gingerly indicated the thin piece of vellum on the desk in front of him “-is definitely a religious document, and it talks about a ceremony, and a mountain, and redemption- at least, I think that’s what this word means.” Sam picked up a scrawled sheet of notes, tracing his finger down the page, squinting as he tried to find a match for the glyphs on the vellum.

“That’s- That could be great,” Dean said, aware that his voice sounded strained, but his heart was suddenly pounding in his throat, and besides, he knew curses were real, so he didn’t want to say the wrong thing and wreck it. “Cas, uh, do you think you could help him with that?”

  


Time had suddenly slowed to a crawl, or the rhythm of Dean’s body had suddenly sped up to a warp factor not generally accepted within the parameters of human functioning. He felt his heart beat fifty times, and looked up at the clock to see that only a few seconds had passed. It was all the worse because he was just sitting here, doing nothing, unable to help, freaking useless.

Sam was frowning, pointing at a passage of text, Cas leaning over the same page, their heads nearly brushing.

“Does this word mean ceremonial or sacrificial?” Sam asked.

Castiel shrugged. He still performed human gestures awkwardly, and the slightly twisted angle of his torso made it look worse. “It depends on the context…”

“The hell?!” Dean interjected. “Are you sure this is the right ritual?”

Sam nodded tersely. Dean could see he was irritating him, and knew he should back off, but it was frustrating, sitting here useless. They were close- they could be close- to finding something that would work, something that would save Cas, and he wanted to do something, run or shoot or punch, anything other than just sitting here.

Time was still behaving oddly, now moving forward in great spurts. Castiel and Sam were still hunched over the Ritual, still translating, but Castiel’s color was fading, and Sam was giving him urgent looks.

“Hey, Cas,” Dean said jovially. “I’m dead beat. What say we call it a night?” It was so transparent, he didn’t know why he bothered lying any more. It just felt wrong to state outright what they all knew, that Castiel’s strength and power had abandoned him, that attributes he had relied on for millennia were perhaps irreversibly gone.

Castiel rose slowly, steadying himself with the edge of the table, then looked down at Sam. Sam was still seated, still poring over the text.

“No way Sam’s going with us,” Dean said, still in that false-cheerful voice. “He’s a total nerd. There’s no way he’s going until the librarian kicks him out.”

“Yeah.” Sam looked up from the page with a fake smile. “Pretty much.”

The kicking out, as it turned out, happened much sooner than either of them were expecting.

“Freaking university library summer hours,” Dean grumbled.

“Yeah,” Sam agreed, twisting the top off a bottle of aspirin. He made a face. “God, if I never had to look at that tiny writing again…”

“Wait, you’re telling me you’re not finished yet?” Dean yelped, then looked behind him guiltily to make sure he hadn’t woken Castiel up. The angel was still sprawled on the bed.

Sam shook his head. There were dark circles under his eyes. “Dean, I barely read Coptic. It’s pretty much thanks to Cas that we made as much progress as we did.”

“We’ll go back tomorrow?” Dean had meant it as a statement, but it came out sounding like a question. Something big and dark was bearing down on them, and he, with all his guns and knives and fancy driving, was powerless to stop it. Zachariah’s mocking voice echoed through his mind, saying “Stupid hairless ape”, and he felt small, the cold of the concrete floor seeping into his curled body, and Sam’s voice was like a lifeline as he said “Yeah, of course we will”, in tones equal parts tired and confused and concerned. But Dean didn’t explain, he couldn’t, he just sat in the room’s lone chair long after Sam had turned out the lights, staring through the dusky semi-darkness endemic to cheap rooms just off the highway, watching Castiel breathe.

  


The next day, they returned to the library. Cas tired so quickly now that Dean caught himself wondering if it was even worth it to bring him. He quickly pushed the thought away. Leaving Cas behind was too much like giving up on him. They weren’t giving up on Cas, not ever, and not now when they were so close.

  


It took two more days of sorting through Bernard Walter’s disorganized effects, of phonetically sounding out foreign words and looking them up in the battered dictionary, of showing up before the library opened and begging to stay a few minutes late, but Sam was finally fairly confident he had the entire ritual translated correctly.

“There’s still a few details to iron out,” Sam said, leaning over the small round table in the corner of their motel room. “But it looks like a genuine ritual, it looks like it could work, if-” he hesitated. “-if the facet of God is up there.”

“Up where?” Dean asked.

Sam swallowed. His brother wasn’t going to like this part.

“So, uh, you know how God is supposed be omnipotent and omnipresent and benevolent?” he asked.

“Yeah…” Dean didn’t know where this was heading, but he already sounded suspicious. Sam didn’t blame him a bit.

“According to my research, facets aren’t like that,” he said cautiously, determined to break the news gently.

“Which part of that?” Dean demanded.

“Uh, any of it. I mean, facets are definitionally not omnipotent or omnipresent, and whether or not they’re benevolent depends on the event that that triggered the formation of the facet-”

“Ours is good, right? I mean- the facet we’re looking for is, uh, benevolent?”

“Yes,” Sam hastened to reassure his brother. “But the thing about facets is each one only reflects an attitude or emotion, so you can’t ask a facet of, say, wrath for a miracle cure-”

“You’ll just get your ass smited,” Dean agreed sagely.

“Yeah,” Sam said.

“So you have to find the right one, but the whole Ten Commandments thing has gone down tons of times, right?”

Sam sighed. Here it was. “Actually, going through Professor Walters' papers and the library’s resources, I was only able to find evidence of three possible reflections, and only one of them looks like what we’re looking for.

“It’s on Mount Carmel.”

Dean gaped. “Mount Carmel like Israel Mount Carmel?”

“Is there another Mount Carmel?” Sam asked drily.

“Probably! Do you know how many Mount Pleasants I’ve driven through? And half of them didn’t even have a mountain.

“But that’s not the point. There were how many thousand Native American tribes in North America? And you’re telling me God never appeared before any of them- no signs, no miracles- that He just ignored a whole continent, there’s got to be something out there, some facet or whatever we can actually use. We can’t just go flying off to Israel.” Dean sounded desperate.

There it was, the objection Sam had known would come. Dean desperately wanted to save Castiel- Sam had never known him to pursue a goal with such singular intensity- but his fear of flying was as intense as it was irrational, and Sam doubted that there was anything in the world that would make him get on a plane without some serious balking.

“Maybe you’re right,” Sam said diplomatically. “Probably you are,” he amended quickly as Dean opened his mouth to say something. “But we haven’t found any evidence of fragments of God in the U.S., and even if we did, each one is sort of attuned to the culture in which it was formed. We’d need a whole different ritual.

“And we don’t have a lot of time.”

The statement hung in the air. It felt naked, and stung like a betrayal. But it was _true_ , Sam told himself fervently, and they had to look the truth in the face sometimes, even if it hurt.

They couldn’t hide from this truth for much longer.

“Got proof that Mount Carmel’s gonna work?” Dean asked sullenly. It was a feint, and they both knew it.

“Other than it being recognized as a holy site by every major world religion? And there being an entire Carmelite order?” Sam shot back.

Dean sat in silence for what felt like a very long time, staring down at his feet. Sam didn’t speak. He knew he’d have to let his brother come to this conclusion on his own, that if he pushed him now, he’d have to start all over again.

“Tomorrow morning, I guess I’ll start getting us ready to fly out,” he said in a tone of utter defeat.

“I’ll head back to the library one more time and make sure we haven’t missed anything,” Sam said.

He didn’t acknowledge his brother’s statement directly. The things they left unsaid hung between them, shadowy and silent, yet somehow heavy and tangible.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for: swearing, mentions of illness and discussions of disability, mentions of animal death and blood, flashbacks and mentions of genocide.


	11. Keep the Lamps Trimmed and A-Burning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The angels had taken so much from Cas, stripping him of his Grace and powers, and now they seemed determined to rob him of the quiet dignity that had sustained him through the steady loss of strengths that even his human vessel ought to have possessed.

  


Though the things unacknowledged still hung in the air, it was harder to feel them in the morning bustle of the three getting ready to head out the door.

“Dean, if you need a mirror, use the one in the bathroom. You’re in my way,” Sam sniped, accidentally elbowing his brother as he knotted his necktie. _One last day of professor disguise._

“Whatever, dude. Wouldn’t be a problem if you didn’t keep trying to kill me.” Dean backed away, massaging the center of his chest.

Sam ignored his brother’s grumbling retreat, instead concentrating on trying to get his hair to lie flat, or at least make it look like a deranged bird hadn’t mistaken him for a nesting site. When they weren’t being mistaken for a couple, people tended to assume Dean was the younger brother, and Sam was pretty sure it wasn’t because of his height. So Sam ignored his brother, knowing that without attention Dean would eventually stop complaining and continue getting ready.

But when Dean said “Cas? You’re not up yet?” there was a note of anxiety in his voice that made Sam turn around in time to see Cas slowly dragging himself to the edge of the bed, bracing his hands against the mattress, struggling to rise, trembling with effort- and then sinking back to the mattress. Sam and Dean both stared, hardly breathing, as Castiel tried again, palms flat against the white sheets, thin arms shaking- This time his legs barely began to straighten before his knees gave way and he collapsed back to the bed.

A longer pause, in which Castiel panted for breath and the Winchesters stared at each other over the top of his head. Then, carefully, every motion deliberate, Castiel tried again to stand, brow furrowed and lips narrow. This time he barely lifted his body off of the mattress before falling back, head hanging and eyes downcast.

Dean was the first to break the silence, not, at least initially with words, but with the scraping sound of denim rubbing on itself and the dull thud of his footsteps as he paced in growing agitation. After completing five circuits of the room, he stared at Sam, his eyes wide as though in growing horror, but also dreadfully blank, as though he could not process what he had seen. Before his brother could speak, he turned away, muttering “dammit” in a strangled voice as he resumed pacing.

Sam looked from his brother- still pacing, occasionally running a hand through his hair as he cursed under his breath- to Castiel, who sat on the on the edge of the bed, shoulders slumped and head hanging. This had been inevitable, he knew. He had known since Castiel had explained Heaven’s curse. Maybe Cas just didn’t think the way most people did- wasn’t instinctually aware of the responses of a human body. He knew Dean’s reason, though. He had lived with his brother all of his life and knew that if something was too painful, Dean would refuse to look it in the face until he had no other choice. Dean was looking away the only way he could. Sam, though, had known this was going to happen. He cleared his throat.

“Dean, do you have the keys for the Impala?”

His brother stared at him, eyes wild and uncomprehending.

Sam tried again. “Can I borrow the car keys? I need to go to the drug store.”

Something Sam said must have gotten through, because Dean shook his head and said “Sam, you can’t just buy pills..” His voice trailed off, leaving the last half of the sentence unsaid. _To make him walk. To make this better._

“I’m going to buy a wheelchair.” Sam tried to keep his voice patient and gentle, but a faint note of exasperation crept in.

It was a tribute to the depth of Dean’s shock that he did not immediately call his brother out on this, but rather reached into the pocket of his suit and mutely offered him the keys.

  


Neither Dean nor Cas spoke during the half hour that elapsed from the time Sam grabbed the keys and strode out the door to the moment the door swung open and Sam entered, lugging a folding wheelchair. There was no need. Cas continued sitting on the edge of the bed- not that he had a lot of choice- looking more dejected and hopeless than he ever had since Dean had met him. After a while, Dean seated himself on the opposite edge of the mattress and sat with his back to his friend, relying on presence alone to express what he had no words to say.

The angels had taken so much from Cas, stripping him of his Grace and powers, and now they seemed determined to rob him of the quiet dignity that had sustained him through the steady loss of strengths that even his human vessel ought to have possessed. There was really nothing Dean or any one could say to that, so they sat in silence, and if Sam noticed the strange tableau when he returned to the room, awkwardly fumbling with chair and door and keys, he said nothing.

  


There were still a few loose ends in the Ritual- a few stray words that needed re-translating, brief passages that needed their context better explored- so someone needed to go back to the library. It didn’t take much debate to decide it would be Sam. The sudden change in Castiel’s apparent abilities might draw unwelcome attention, and besides, Sam thought but did not say- his life was a study in the art of leaving things unsaid- Castiel was wearing one of Dean’s flannel shirts on top of his own T-shirt and beneath his unbuttoned trench coat.

  


Sam clicked the pen open and closed repeatedly. It was a nervous habit he’d picked up in college, and one which drove Dean crazy. Not that he was here to hear it. Sam glanced up at the screen of his laptop, still fiddling with the pen and now chewing his lower lip. Dean wasn’t going to like this, but he had a right to know. And so did Cas.

“Hello?”

Sam regretted calling as soon as Dean picked up. He sounded tense and stretched thin. Sam remembered his fist sinking into the plaster of a shabby motel room wall. He wasn’t sure how much bad news he could take.

“There’s kind of a…” Sam groped for the right word, the most diplomatic way to put this. Three nights ago, he awoken from a dream in which Lucifer had stood beside him on a rocky pinnacle, gesturing down at the barren land below. And as he swept his hand, mirages had blossomed in the hot air: Jess, alive, happy and beautiful; Bobby, standing on his own two feet with a curmudgeonly expression, but a proud smile in his eyes; Dean, standing before a white house next to a faceless woman and two children. Sam had pushed it away, but while he hovered between sleep and waking, he had been certain he had heard Castiel’s voice saying “All of them, fighting. The angels and the men and the beasts. Why? This wasn’t the plan…” And the mental image of Dean’s fist hitting the wall was suddenly searingly painful, and Sam could hear the silence on the other end of the phone, his brother still there, but not daring to breathe, so he scrunched his eyes shut and said “... a sort of hang up.” And it sounded lame, and he knew it, but Dean was asking what the problem was, so there was no choice but to plunge on.

“Mount Carmel isn’t really a mountain the way Kilimanjaro or Mount McKinley are,” he explained. “It’s more like a… twenty mile chain of hills.”

He paused, waiting for Dean to catch on, but his brother said nothing.

“And we don’t know which point to ascend,” he admitted.

There was a muffled noise from the speaker that might have been Dean swallowing. The thought of ascending peak after peak over a twenty mile expanse was in and of itself daunting, even without thinking of Cas, even without the ticking clock.

“Can you figure it out?” he asked finally.

“I’m trying,” Sam said, wishing he could say more and could say something more useful. Dean seemed disheartened, of course, but he was taking it with better equanimity than he had expected. In the small part of himself that wasn’t worried and discouraged, Sam felt a tremulous stirring of hope. Somehow, Dean was finding his footing again, maybe even a better footing. But it would all fall away, he knew, unless he could find the right mountain.

  


In the evening, Sam returned to their motel room, bleary-eyed from computer screens and microfiche. 

“Did you find anything?” Dean demanded, hovering by Castiel’s bedside. Had he gotten up at all today? Maybe it was better if he hadn’t; he had so little strength left to save.

“Yeah.” Sam shut his eyes, aware that his evidence was unconvincing. Somehow, it felt worse than going on a hunt uncertain what would kill the creature. “Jewish tradition holds that Elijah’s cave- where God sheltered him and saved him from famine- is in the northern part of Mount Carmel. Saint Berthold had a vision that led him to establish the Carmelites in the same area.

“We’ve gone into hunts with less before,” he added when Dean still looked unconvinced. _Not_ , he added mentally, _that all those hunts had gone well_.

Dean was still frowning, still chewing the inside of his cheek, even though it had to be a raw and bloody pulp by now, but they both knew it was unlikely they would find more information, and doubtful that they had more time.

Dean looked over his shoulder, gazing at Cas’s huddled form.

“We’ll go with it,” he said finally. “After all,” his voice was bitter, “we’ve gone into hunts with less.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for: swearing and disability-related issues.


	12. Shall Soon Dissolve Like Snow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The tops of the clouds were golden with the reflected light of the sun. They stretched out in a dense, fluffy field as far as Castiel could see. Before, Castiel had believed that the notion that Heaven was located above the earth was just a baffling human misconception. But now, he understood. The sky was achingly blue, the golden light so intense it transfixed him. He felt closer to Heaven than he had since he had fallen, and yet impossibly distant.

  


When the Winchesters and Cas accepted, however hesitantly, that the ritual they had been researching was _the_ Ritual, it was like a switch had been pulled. The familiar but slow work of researching was replaced by the the unfamiliar rush of preparing to travel internationally in short order.

“The soonest flights that aren’t booked solid leave in three days,” Sam said, finger hovering over the tracker mouse of his laptop. “Do you think you can get us passports by then?”

Dean swallowed audibly at the word “flights”, but answered his brother promptly. “I’ve already called Bobby. He knows some guys across the border in Maryland. I can take some pictures of us and head over there tonight.”

“Do you already have names picked out?” Sam asked, actually turning away from his computer for the first time in hours. The strain of the last few weeks was written on his face, and Dean wondered if he had been sleeping anymore than he had.

“Nah, I’ll probably think of something on the drive over.” Dean shrugged.

Sam frowned. The expression was becoming habitual. “Just… Be careful, ok? I know the FBI probably thinks we’re dead, but the TSA is going to get suspicious if Jimmy Page and Brian May go through security.”

“Dude, Bobby recommended these guys. The passports could say Elvis Presley, Saddam Hussein and Sarah Palin and they wouldn’t bat an eye.”

Sam gave him a withering look. Anyone Bobby recommended would be top notch, but now was not the time to push their luck.

“You don’t have to- I won’t screw it up.” Dean’s voice was quieter than usual, and his gaze drifted away from Sam, toward the bed where Castiel lay in an untidy heap.

Castiel scarcely left the bed anymore, and he spent much of his time asleep or in a state like sleep. _In the week that was to prove his last, Ezra Peakes sank into a sort of stupor_ … Dean tried to dismiss the unwelcome thought. Ezra Peakes had been just a man; Cas was an angel. He had to have more time than a human. And they were so close to a cure…

“Cas, sit up.” Sam hadn’t expected Dean’s voice to suddenly be so gruff. “You need to do something with your hair.” Cas’s hair was disheveled. Dean gestured broadly around his jawline. “And your face.” Cas hadn’t shaved for the last two days.

Cas slowly raised himself to a sitting position, his face so drawn that Sam wondered if he were in pain. Dean must have noticed, too, because he relented a bit. “Uh, your face is fine. Just do something about your hair,” he said, pulling a miniature comb out of his pocket.

When Dean left half an hour later, it was with a camera in his jacket pocket and the mute hope that they weren’t too late. He tried to dismiss the thought. They still had time. Thinking anything else felt like blasphemy.

Of course, thoughts didn’t work like that, as much as Dean wanted them to. So his nerves were tense for the whole long drive, and the entire transaction with Bobby’s recommended forgers. He probably seemed like their usual clientele, he thought bitterly.

It was well after dark when Dean got back to the motel room. He’d stopped once on the way back, pulling into the bar more for a chance to stretch his legs than for the booze. Maybe he’d gotten used to the micro-trips they’d been making with Cas. Maybe it just felt weird being in the car alone. He could practically hear his thoughts rattling around in the empty space.

But rather than submerging his uneasiness, the babble in the bar seemed to agitate it. He didn’t remember that happening. Then again, he hadn’t been in a bar since… since the day Castiel fell.

In the end, he only drank a beer before slouching back to the Impala. He could feel it sloshing in his empty stomach as he slipped back into the darkened motel room, feeling strangely guilty even though, hell, it was only a beer, and it wasn’t like he was a teenager and had to sneak around.

But whether from guilt or nerves or the same-old weight of forty years of Hell, Dean couldn’t find a way to sleep on the too-short cot at the foot of the two proper beds. Instead, he lay still and listened. Sam was asleep. He knew what Sam sleeping sounded like, could probably even tell what he was dreaming about if the creepiness hadn’t been enough to keep him from trying. But Cas- Cas was too still and too quiet, clearly only pretending to be asleep. He had to be the world’s suckiest actor.

Dean rolled over. The cot was so narrow that the edge of the metal frame ground into his upper arm. He still thought of Cas as an angel, and angel or no, he sure kept up the “no emotions” act. But Cas had to be more scared than Dean. He turned over again. The frame squeaked. Great. Now he was staring at the wall, and the frame was digging into his other arm.

“Dean?” Cas whispered.

Screw it. He wasn’t fooling anyone either. “Yeah?”

Silence. Dean waited.

The silence continued.

Another angelic trait Cas retained: being totally inscrutable.

Dean rolled onto his back. The cot sagged.

“I’m scared.” Cas’s voice was so quiet he could hardly hear him.

“I know.” It was the first thing he thought of, and he regretted it immediately. He wasn’t Han Solo, damnit.

But maybe it wasn’t the stupidest thing he could have said after all, because by the time he rolled over again, pretty much giving up on finding a comfortable position, Castiel’s breathing had evened out into the rhythm of genuine sleep.

  


The last few days before their departure were a frantic blur. Dean was pretty sure Sam had completely repacked at least three times, even though he denied it.

The night before their flight, there was nothing left to do. The motel room was too close to the highway to ever really be quiet, but after the earlier rush of activity, it felt uncannily still. Castiel was asleep. At a certain point, exhaustion outweighed any emotion.

Sam had yet to hear the grumbling snores that invariably signaled his brother’s descent into sleep. Dean was lying awake, too. It had to be worse for him. Sam had never seen him so driven, not even to save his own life. If they failed… Sam pushed aside the unthinkable thought, but the prospect loomed larger with each passing day. Besides, Dean was terrified of flying. The thought of him spending eighteen hours on a plane made Sam feel queasy out of sympathy.

Time dragged on as Sam tried to restrain his thoughts, keeping them in permissible channels. Once, Dean’s futon squeaked as he shifted position. Castiel made a stifled sound that could have been an aborted whimper or a muffled snore.

Sometime after midnight, he heard the rustle of sheets and the scraping of the futon’s metal frame as Dean got up. If he hadn’t been lying there, straining for the slightest sound to break the monotony of the sleepless night, he would have missed it. Dean tiptoed across the motel room with a catlike tread. Sam lay perfectly still, eyes almost completely closed, the very image of sleeping innocence. The zipper of Dean’s duffel bag squeaked, and there was a quiet sloshing sound as Dean gently lifted his flask from where it had lain hidden in a nest of clothing. Sam swallowed back a sudden lump in his throat. He hadn’t seen Dean drink since the day Castiel fell. Dean had been sober for nearly a month, and he hadn’t noticed.

A strange mixture of emotions bubbled up in his chest: guilt, because he hadn’t helped his brother stay on the right path, hadn’t even told him how proud and glad he was to see him sober- hadn’t even noticed. But there was also hope. Dean had gone nearly a month without drinking. Maybe, just maybe, the memories of Hell had less of a grip on him. Maybe things were getting better. But that was an absurd thought for someone living on a planet condemned by Heaven and besieged by Hell, so he pushed it away, let his mind go blank, and finally sank into sleep.

  


Lucifer was waiting on the edges of Sam’s dreams. He always was, now. You could be a Vessel, Lucifer told him, voice soft and gentle as the hiss of a cobra. One little word, and it could all be yours. We could tear down the Heaven that’s hurt you so much, save your brother’s angel. No, Sam said. In the dream he no longer knew why he was saying it, just that he had to. It was how their dance always went, Lucifer twirling and spinning him into a deep dip, Sam maintaining tension against his lead.

He awoke just before dawn. The light that seeped through the heavy curtains was a deep blue. He could see Dean silhouetted in the early light, propped on one elbow as he half sat, half lay on his cot at the foot of Castiel’s bed, staring toward the curtained window.

“Hey,” Sam said softly. “Want to start packing the car?”

  


Sam thought he had done a good job preparing for the trip, but he had underestimated the sheer amount of last minute chaos.

“No, you can’t take either whiskey _or_ holy water with you,” Sam snapped, aware that he was snapping, but also painfully aware that he had explained this at least three times. “No liquids over 3.5 ounces, except in checked luggage.”

“But we could last time,” Dean protested, clutching the flask to his chest like a teddy bear.

“Yeah, well, they’ve changed the rules,” Sam said shortly, glancing up from labeling Castiel’s wheelchair with his assumed name in Sharpie, a task which would have been easier if it hadn’t been parked in the middle of a disorganized heap of duffel bags.

“Someone tried to blow a plane up with hand sanitizer?” Dean sounded skeptical.

“Something like that.” Sam pulled out his phone to check the time.

“Dean, you’re not seriously going to wear those boots?” Sam asked as he reorganized the trunk for the third time. He was trying to keep the three bags going with them to Israel by themselves on the left side of the trunk, but Dean’s form of loading the car appeared to be piling everything together.

“It’s not church, is it?” Dean demanded irritably.

Sam’s sigh actually ruffled the fringe of hair on his forehead. “No, but you have to take off your shoes for security. Those boots are going to take forever to put back on.”

“We’re climbing a mountain, Sam,” Dean said stubbornly. “And I am not taking up all the space in my bag with a pair of freaking boots.”

They were nearly out the door when Sam remembered. “Dean,” he asked urgently. “Did you take it out of your shoe?”

“Huh?” Dean, who had been pushing Castiel’s wheelchair towards the door, now stopped, looking at his brother in confusion.

“The emergency backup credit card, the one you always keep in your boot. The one with the really stupid alias. Is it still there?”

“Richard Magnum II?” Dean demanded.

Sam rolled his eyes.

“Come on, that’s a great name! It’s gotten me some amazing stuff.” Dean winked salaciously.

Sam gritted his teeth. It would be a miracle if he got through the next twenty-four hours without wearing his molars down to stubs. “ _I don’t care_ ,” he ground out. “Just take it out of your boot before security finds it and kicks us out of the airport.”

There was a moment of hesitation in which Dean’s face displayed exactly how much he would like to be kicked out of the airport, before he sat down on the edge of the bed and began the tedious process of unlacing his boots. Sam ground his teeth again at this indication of what the airport would be like.

  


The airport, as it turned out, was exactly as bad as Sam had feared. Castiel was perpetually confused and entranced by novel human customs and institutions, and the airport was certainly novel. On the one hand, he seemed more alive than he had in days, but on the other, his constant stream of questions seemed bound to attract attention, and the curious, birdlike way in which he turned his head to study the countless new sights made Sam feel guiltily relieved that he was confined to a wheelchair. This was pretty much the only situation he could see which didn’t involve frantically searching the entire airport for Cas.

Behind them, Dean, burdened with luggage, sulked and stomped like an overgrown four year old, or maybe an ogre. (Sam wasn’t sure how much difference there was between the two, anyways.) Part of Sam wished Dean were ahead of him, so if he surrendered to his evident terror and turned tail and ran, he at least had a chance of catching him. Another, somewhat larger, part of Sam was certain Dean wouldn’t run. He wanted to save Cas too much. A third portion of Sam’s mind niggled at him, suggesting that it would have been humane to slip Dean a few Benadryl before they had left this morning. Sam might have done it, if it weren’t for the fact that he needed Dean conscious and alert. Someone had to carry the baggage, and Sam couldn’t manage both that and Castiel at the same time.

  


The security line snaked through a maze of dividers. It was an attempt to get as many people through in as little time and space as possible, but there was a distinct hold up. Sam craned his neck, trying to see the source of the slow down.

“This way, please,” a very bored TSA agent said, waving Sam to the left as the line divided into two.

Sam followed her instructions, pushing Castiel’s wheelchair ahead of him. As the line divided, he was finally able to see far enough down the other queue to locate the source of the slow down. Sam clenched his jaw as he saw it. Dean.

The work boots were as bad as he had feared. Dean had tugged one off and deposited in the grey plastic bin, but he was still unlacing the other. Behind him, a blue suited business traveler shifted uncomfortably, glancing first at the man in the flannel shirt, and then at his watch. Dean continued pulling on the laces of his right boot. Sam groaned inwardly as his line forced him and Castiel forward another few steps. He’d double knotted them, hadn’t he?

When Sam was able to look up again, the line was now filing around his brother. Sam gritted his teeth and continued through the security screening. There was nothing he could do except pretend he didn’t know Dean.

This resolution only lasted, as Sam knew it would, until he exited screening. It would be simply inhumane to ask his terrified brother to navigate the airport himself, and Sam knew he could survive a little more embarrassment. Being seen in public with Dean hadn’t killed him yet. Besides, they still had to get to the gate and actually board the plane. His plausible deniability would start to run out about the same time Dean tried to sit next to him.

  


They arrived at their gate almost an hour before boarding was to start. Dean swallowed hard, aware that his face was probably somewhere between “fish belly white” and “moldy bread green” and trying to look less terrified. But waiting was almost as bad as being on the plane. Almost.

Dean scrunched his eyes shut so he wouldn’t have to see the passenger planes sitting on the tarmac. Maybe it was fine for Cas, he thought. Angels were supposed to fly. But humans were most decidedly not. He had no idea how Sam took this so calmly. Then again, he had no idea why Sam was so terrified of clowns. Maybe it was something like that.

This trail of thought meandered into a dead end, replaced by the looming image of an airplane’s cabin, filled with billowing demonic smoke and tossed violently about. Closing his eyes wasn’t helping anymore. Determined to appear casual, he yawned and nonchalantly stretched his arms, unconcernedly invading the personal space of everyone around him, making it appear he had just so happened to let his eyes drift shut. Sam didn’t notice, since he was talking to Castiel.

“- going to be on a plane for a long time, and they’re not exactly very accessible, so make sure you use the bathroom before we board.” Sam had no recollection of his mother, but he was pretty sure this was what being a mother felt like. Given the look the woman sitting behind him was giving him as her curly-haired toddler climbed on her lap and tugged at her hair, she felt the same way.

Cas nodded, turning his chair toward the area Sam had indicated, toward the sign reading Men . He could still move his chair by himself, at least for short distances.

Castiel rolled his chair slowly towards the men’s room. Living the last month as a human had given him an entirely new perspective on the beings. He was aware now, in a way he had never been before, of the limits of even a fully functional human body. It was amazing what they had accomplished. He appreciated, too, the accommodations they had made for those whose bodies were less capable. It was very different than the angels. They were soldiers. There, there were two choices: keep up or fall behind. The accommodations the humans had made granted him some independence, a measure of dignity, but for how much longer he could not be certain. He was tired all the time now, an exhaustion that clouded his mind and sapped the strength of his body, and any extra effort, such as lifting himself from his chair, made the muscles in his arms burn. The sensation gradually diminished to a dull ache, but never entirely faded away. Castiel had not mentioned this, and he never would. He had promised Dean that this was not a painful way to die, and he would not let him think otherwise. Besides, compared to most ways an angel could be killed, his would be a gentle death.

  


“Passengers who have physical difficulties or need extra time, please board now…”

“That would be us,” Sam said tautly, gripping the handles of Castiel’s wheelchair. “Dean! Come on.”

The older Winchester stood behind his brother, holding all of their carry-on luggage- everything they were bringing- and looking like he might be sick. Dean nodded reluctantly, and, with great effort, raised one foot, taking a single step after his brother, looking like he was being led to the execution chamber.

Sam automatically slid into the window seat. It would be the least convenient place for Cas to be, and he knew Dean would want to be as far away from the window as possible. The flight attendant who had taken Cas’s wheelchair when they entered the plane motioned for Dean to step by. He refused, shaking his head.

“Mr. Wilson would probably find the aisle seat more convenient,” the flight attendant said in a firm but polite voice.

Dean seemed petrified, but before he could manage to say anything, or do more than shake his head in mute protest, Castiel said, “I would actually prefer the middle.”

The stewardess’s brows arched a little, but she nonetheless helped Cas into the middle seat.

It could have been Sam’s imagination, but he thought that he saw Dean mouth “thank you” as he slipped into aisle seat.

  


The plane taxied down the runway, slowly at first, but quickly gaining speed. Dean’s hands were claws locked into the armrests of his seat, his eyes scrunched shut, his lips soundlessly mouthing what most people would have taken for a prayer, but Sam knew was the lyrics to a Metallica song.

Cas, for his part, took this novel mode of transport with perfect equanimity, swiveling his head about to study the other passengers and the glimpses of runway that were visible as the plane sped past. Sam obligingly moved his head so he could have a better view.

There was a sudden lurch as the wheels of the plane lost contact with the tarmac. Dean groaned quietly, eyes still shut. He seemed too lost in his terror to notice Castiel’s slim hand resting on the back of his own, and perhaps Cas was unaware of where of his hand was resting, because he seemed riveted by the view out the window.

The nose of the plane thrust through the clouds, and Castiel gasped. Sam turned his head towards him rapidly, intending to ask if he was alright, if he was in pain, but the question died away at the look of rapture on Castiel’s face.

The tops of the clouds were golden with the reflected light of the sun. They stretched out in a dense, fluffy field as far as Castiel could see. Before, Castiel had believed that the notion that Heaven was located above the earth was just a baffling human misconception. But now, he understood. The sky was achingly blue, the golden light so intense it transfixed him. He felt closer to Heaven than he had since he had fallen, and yet impossibly distant. A fierce pain in the center of his chest made it impossible to tear his gaze away, impossible to move, save for an unconscious tightening of the hand that rested upon Dean Winchester’s. He remained frozen in place, filled with so much beauty and longing that it was painful, until the plane banked and the cloud field left his line of sight.

  


“Miss.” Dean reached toward to the stewardess, holding out a plastic cup. “Could I get another whiskey?”

“I’m sorry.” She shook her head, an excess of hairspray keeping her wave-like curls surprisingly immobile. “I can’t give you anymore on this flight.”

“But it’s not _doing_ anything,” Dean protested whinily, still holding out the cup.

“Hey Dean.” Sam craned his neck to be visible around Castiel, who was studying the grey waters far below them as though they were the most fascinating thing in the world, and seemed completely unconscious to the conversation going on around him. “We’re over the middle of the Atlantic. Try not to do anything that will get you put on the No Fly List.”

It was kind of a low blow, and he knew it, feeling a pang of regret when Dean hastily put the cup down on the tray, turning a sort of greyish color again, but Dean had no business hassling the flight attendant.

“Excuse me,” Castiel said politely, turning toward the stewardess. Sam was surprised he even knew she was there. “May I request a glass of whiskey?”

The stewardess looked at Sam as though asking his permission, despite the fact that no one would mistake Cas for a minor. Sam put on his blankest face, hoping to convey that he had nothing to do with any of this.

“I have a…” Castiel drew a small purple rectangle from his wallet, and held it about two inches from his nose, studying it before proffering it to the bemused flight attendant. “... credit card. I can pay.”

Maybe it was out of pity; maybe it was out of a desperate desire to stop dealing with this band of lunatics, but the stewardess miraculously handed Castiel a shot of whiskey in a flared plastic cup.

No sooner had she walked away, then Castiel carefully set the small glass on Dean’s tray. Dean grabbed it and swallowed it in one gulp. Sam sighed and looked out the window.

  


They were in France. At least, Sam thought they were. He was tired and no longer remembered the abbreviations printed on their transfer tickets. The announcements that boomed through the airport were first in a language that might have been French- Sam had studied languages that most scholars considered dead, and had had precious little time for the ones thought of as living- and then in English. Sam looked around, bleary eyed. He had wanted to go to France, once. Jess had talked, half joking, about their big honeymoon. Sam had hedged. International travel under your own name just wasn’t in the cards when you were a Winchester. He regretted the conversation now. He regretted a lot of things. He’d wanted to go to France- just not like this.

Dean, remarkably steady on his feet for a man with eight shots of whiskey flowing through his bloodstream, though still pale from the terror of the landing, had somehow acquired both their baggage and Cas.

“Here, you don’t have to take everything,” Sam offered automatically. Dean more or less flung the duffel bags at him in response.

Sam sighed, adjusted the bags so they hung off of his shoulders in a more balanced manner, and examined his now somewhat crumpled ticket. “We need to get to… um… Gate C12.” He looked up, trying to find some sign that would lead him in the right direction, but the hubbub of the passing crowd and the impassive announcements echoed off of the high ceilings, creating a featureless din that obscured his vision like mist so he had to blink hard and rub a hand across his eyes to see clearly. “There’s a sign over there. Maybe it’s got directions.”

The group trudged in the direction of Sam’s pointing finger. _We have hours more to go_ , he realized dully. And then, _If I’m this tired… I don’t think Cas can take much more_. An icy stab of fear made his gut clench, and he turned around, looking at Cas properly for the first time since they had landed.

The airport had copious skylights, supplemented with more standard fluorescent light fixtures, but the sky outside was dark, and the flickering fluorescents did no one any favors. Even so, Sam could see that Cas was paler than Dean had been when the plane had taken off, that his chin drooped to his chest, and he could hear the frightening, rasping struggle beginning in his breathing. _Shit_. They had to get him to a place where he could rest, now.

Sam navigated the airport with decisiveness that made many passengers think he was a frequent visitor. But it was a faux confidence born of desperation, and the long, crisp strides were just a trick he had learned while impersonating countless federal agents: act like you know what you’re doing, and people will tend to get out of your way. For once, Sam unabashedly used his height to clear a path through the crowd. Behind him, Dean and Cas struggled to keep up.

At last, Gate C12 came into sight. It was still fairly quiet- their flight didn’t leave for hours. Sam had thought this was suboptimal when he booked the tickets, but with three days notice, he hadn’t had much choice. Now, he wasn’t certain if it had been for the better or the worse, and he didn’t have a lot of spare mental energy to spend on contemplating this topic.

Sam scanned the gate. Fairly quiet- lots of open chairs… The chairs were joined together in a bench-like bank, but each chair was separated from the others by black armrests. There wasn’t really a place for Cas to lie down, except- Sam glanced downwards- the floor. That was an absolute last resort; it would involve lifting Cas out of his wheelchair, then picking him up to settle him back in, and Sam’s dignity twinged sympathetically at the very thought.

Sam looked around: other gates, some with more people, others nearly as deserted; Dean standing by Cas’s side, face taut with concern; Cas raising his head with evident effort, staring ahead with an expression of calm dignity or deadened exhaustion, the shadows under his eyes deep like bruises; and, ahead of him, a desk. A woman in a blue blazer and red scarf stood at the desk- an employee of their airline. There probably wasn’t anywhere for them to go, Sam thought, a mental list of common airport features scrolling through his head, but at least she knew her way around. Maybe she could help them. He was certainly going to try.

Sam approached the woman- Yvonne, her name tag said- hoping that she spoke English, and fairly certain that she had to, given that she worked in an international airport. “Excuse me,” he began a bit hesitantly, uncertain of what to say. “My friend-” He gestured toward Castiel, who was still a few yards away, closer to the hallway that lead between gates than to the desk. Dean, aware that every step now had a cost for Castiel, even if he only had to hold his body upright while someone else pushed his wheelchair, had stopped there until he was more certain of Sm’s plan. “Is there a place where he can rest?” The din of the airport seemed to rise up to echo around him, as though mocking him for the futility of his request.

Yvonne didn’t seem to notice. She was used to the sounds after working eight hour days for weeks or months on end. “Does he need a doctor?” she asked softly. Perhaps her voice really was soft; perhaps it was only her accent. Accent or no, though, Sam was certain that her voice was kind. She wasn’t dismissing them out of hand, saying this wasn’t her job or she had boarding calls to arrange.

“No, no,” Sam hastened to assure her. “He just gets like this when he’s tired.

“It’s my fault,” he admitted, brow furrowing. “I should have split the travel into two days. “( _I thought we couldn’t afford the time. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered either way what we chose to to do._ ) “If he can just rest for a bit, he’ll be alright.” ( _Please don’t make my brother watch his angel suffocate in some cold, noisy airport._ )

Sam knew he was talking too much, too fast, especially since English probably wasn’t this woman’s first language. She probably heard hundreds of complaints and requests a day; his evident desperation was likely doing nothing more than annoying her.

He was surprised to Yvonne looking at him with compassion- Dean would have called it pity and stormed off in a huff- but he was grateful that she at least offered kindness.

“When does your flight leave?” she asked.

In response, Sam reached into his pocket and mutely handed her his ticket. The numbers on it were so much gibberish to him right now. He had no idea what time it was or even what time zone he was in.

“You’re the next flight out of this gate, in almost five hours,” she said. “There’s a first class lounge a few gates over.” She glanced down at her computer, tapping out a few strokes on the keyboard. “No one should be using it now; there aren’t any flights out of that gate until tomorrow morning.”

Yvonne fished a key out of a drawer in the desk, and Sam found himself following her, beckoning for Dean and Cas to come along. She walked briskly toward an area a little ways past C12. This gate was practically deserted. Yvonne walked past the bank of chairs, identical to the ones at their gate, and turned down a short hallway at the edge of the large room. She unlocked the door and peeked in before turning back to Sam. “You can come in. But if anyone finds you, I wasn’t the one who let you in,” she said, before turning and leaving.

Sam looked into the room. The first class lounge was a sort of cross between a waiting room and a nice living room. There were armchairs, little tables, and- Sam felt a weight leave his shoulders- several dark blue couches.

Dean wordlessly turned to one of the couches, still pushing Cas’s wheelchair. He gently lifted him onto the couch, then took off his flannel shirt and laid it over Cas’s shoulders. There were no pillows on the couch, so he reached down and nudged Cas’s shoulder. “Do I get a place to sit down, too?”

Cas raised his head enough for Dean to slip in at the end of the couch. Dean put a hand on his shoulder, indicating that it was alright for him to relax, and Cas let his head sink into Dean’s lap.

Sam stood by the large window overlooking the tarmac, sometimes staring out at the taxiing planes, sometimes scrolling through web pages on his phone. Dean never reacted well when his feigned stoicism was stripped away, so Sam felt it was wisest not to look. Eventually, and to Sam’s surprise, Yvonne returned, carrying a blanket. It was thin and not particularly soft; she had probably fished it out of some emergency kit, but Dean accepted it with good grace and pulled it over Castiel.

After the transatlantic flight, Sam had thought he would never want to sit again, but after a while his feet became tired from standing and, somewhat against his better judgment, he sat down in an armchair across the room from Dean’s couch. When he didn’t immediately receive a volley of sarcasm designed to drive him back to another corner of the room, he cautiously peered over the top of his phone. Cas had fallen asleep with his head in Dean’s lap; his eyes were closed and his breathing was regular. It was obvious why Sam hadn’t been subjected to a stream of cutting remarks, yet he was still surprised that Castiel’s exhaustion had outweighed Dean’s dignity.

Yvonne came back one more time before they had to leave to board their plane, carrying water bottles, crackers and fresh fruit. _She probably bought those out of her own money_ , Sam realized. He thought of folktales he had stumbled across while researching cases, about people who helped strange travelers, only to discover that they were princes or fairies or other powerful beings. Sam regretted that the universe offered no rewards for those who cared for angels.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for: swearing, mentions of death, disability-related issues, a mention of explosives, airplanes, and alcohol.


	13. Going Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Haifa hit them like a wall of heat. Sam felt his shoulders sag as the wave washed over him. Beside him, Dean looked wilted, and seemed to be bracing himself against the handles of the wheelchair. But Cas- Cas slowly lifted his head, looking up at them with a widening smile. His hands, which had been hidden under a flannel shirt that had been serving as an improvised lap robe, were now open, slightly lifted, feeling the hot air. “It’s warm,” he said softly. “It’s _warm_.”

The last plane touched down. Sam could hear Dean’s loud exhalation of relief, see Cas’s sympathetic smile, and then the flight attendant came on the intercom and announced that the passengers could retrieve their carry-on luggage, and for a few minutes, the cabin was a flurry of noise and activity. Then they were pushing their way through the crowd- Dean’s desperation to set his feet on solid ground again was palpable- stepping onto the tarmac-

And stopping in their tracks as Haifa hit them like a wall of heat. Sam felt his shoulders sag as the wave washed over him. Beside him, Dean looked wilted, and seemed to be bracing himself against the handles of the wheelchair. But Cas- Cas slowly lifted his head, looking up at them with a widening smile. His hands, which had been hidden under a flannel shirt that had been serving as an improvised lap robe, were now open, slightly lifted, feeling the hot air. “It’s warm,” he said softly. “It’s _warm_.”

  


“This is stupid,” Dean complained. “We’re in freaking Jerusalem, and there’s no room in the inn.”

“Haifa,” Sam corrected wearily. They had been in the city for hours, and the heat and noise had worn him down.

“I do not understand.” Cas frowned up at Dean in puzzlement.

Sam and Dean gaped.

“Are you serious?” Dean finally managed. “You can’t…”

Cas was still looking up at Dean.

“You _are_ serious,” he realized. “Oh God, I can’t… Sam, you explain it.”

Sam shook his head. He didn’t want to engage in banter. He wanted to find a hotel, and the sooner the better. Whatever burst of strength Haifa’s heat had given Castiel wouldn’t last, and they’d been traveling for more than eighteen hours. They needed to find somewhere to stay, now.

They’d already passed through the main section of Haifa, and were no longer surrounded by skyscrapers and baking asphalt. This part of the city looked less like a modern metropolis and more like something out of a Bible story. The streets were cobbled and uneven, and the buildings had gradually diminished until most were only two or three stories high. Instead of huge reflective windows, the walls were mostly whitewashed cinder blocks. Here and there, Sam thought he saw the dusty brown of old clay walls.

The streets no longer followed a grid pattern, but twisted and rambled like an ancient river. Sam tried to stay on the main road, but, unable to read either the boxy or the flowing script on the intermittent street signs, he wasn’t certain he was even doing that. Traffic thinned to a trickle. Cars were virtually nonexistent, and even pedestrians became rare. He could hear the quiet, steady clack of the tires of Castiel’s wheelchair as Dean pushed him along the cobbled streets.

“Hey, Sam. Look up,” Dean said quietly. Sam followed his brother’s gaze. To the east stood Mount Carmel. It looked much bigger than Sam had imagined, and its peak was sheer and rocky. In the mornings, he thought, its shadow might stretch to these streets. _We’re almost there_.

This thought stirred him from his reverie. They hadn’t come prepared to camp on the side of the mountain; they needed to find a hotel.

“Come on,” he said, and Dean stopped eyeing the mountain with a strange mixture of trepidation and respect, and began pushing Castiel’s wheelchair again, their odd procession moving slowly forward while the angel continued staring at the rocky slopes with reverence and open longing.

It was minutes, Sam thought until his brother called his bluff. By halting Dean’s mountain-viewing detour he’d looked like he had a plan, and it was only getting clearer that he didn’t. But Dean said nothing, and Sam continued looking between his brother and the city streets, uncertain which was more confusing.

Less than fifteen minutes later, one of the signs hanging off of the businesses contained one of the few words that Sam could actually recognize: Inn. It was strange to see the old-fashioned term, rather than the standard “hotel” or kitschy “motel”, but then, the building itself was old-fashioned. It was one of oldest looking buildings on the block. Made of dusty clay with deeply inset windows, it looked like it could have sprouted out of the desert floor long before anyone thought to lay the cobblestone roads. However, Sam was glad to see that a black cable connected one worn corner of the building to the power pole a little ways down the street. He was desperate, but he still had standards.

“Let’s see if they have rooms,” he said with a heartiness he didn’t feel.

“This is a hotel?” Dean muttered.

“Inn,” Sam corrected automatically, pushing open the door of olive-green wood slats and stepping inside.

The air was deliciously cool after the sun’s unceasing onslaught. Sam thought he heard the faint hum of a distant air conditioner, but it could have just been the insulating properties of the thick mud walls.

The front room was as simple as it was possible to be without becoming totally austere. It contained little more than a frayed rag rug, a whirring electric fan, and a solid wooden desk. Behind the desk sat a man. He was small and unimpressive looking, clearly well into his sixties, with tanned and weathered skin that attested to a life spent primarily outdoors. His sand colored shirt was neatly ironed, and his hair, though combed, formed little cloud-like tufts. But it was his eyes that Sam noticed.

They were grey, grey like the sea, and impossibly old and deep and sad. History and emotion, vaster than Sam could comprehend, seemed to roil in them, drawing him in and under…

“Good afternoon,” the innkeeper said in Hebrew. “May I help you?”

The spell broke. Sam blinked. The innkeeper was just a man, a man with faded hair, and wrinkled skin, and eyes that were grey, grey like dust.

“Do you have an open room?” he asked slowly. This was one of the few Hebrew phrases he had memorized before they had left. Dean had laughed at him, saying that everyone would probably speak English and, though he was likely right, Sam was glad he had learned a little of the language. The idea of speaking to this man in English just felt incredibly _wrong_.

“For three?” the man asked, holding up his fingers to help Sam understand.

“One room for three.” Sam nodded.

“I have a room.” The innkeeper spoke deliberately slowly, but Sam still struggled to understand. “But, it is on the second floor.” He looked meaningfully at Cas, then pointed at the flight of stairs on the edge of the room.

“We will take it. Thank you.” Sam said the last phrase with all the sincerity his rough pronunciation would allow.

The innkeeper nodded gravely and turned to lead them up the stairs.

  


Sam was awake before dawn the following morning, and by the time the deep pink, almost red, glow of the sun was visible on the horizon, the others were up too.

“How long have you been doing that?” Dean asked, nudging his foot towards a few sheets of tattered notebook paper that lay on the floor. Sam was sitting cross-legged on the rug, a desk not having been one of their room’s amenities, his lips moving as he silently rehearsed the words on the page.

“A couple hours. I just wanted to make sure we had everything for the Ritual.” The dark shadows under Sam’s eyes told Dean what he already suspected: his brother had slept just as little as he had.

A stirring and a sort of mumbling sound diverted their attention to Castiel’s bed. He was apparently awake.

“Morning, Cas.” Sam sounded much more relaxed than he had thirty seconds ago. Dean gritted his teeth. Sam’s ability to bluff and outright lie was certainly useful, but he’d had it used against him a bit too much to entirely appreciate it. “You should look outside. The sunrise is spectacular.”

Castiel propped himself up on arms that were too thin ( _When had he lost that much weight?_ Dean wondered), and looked out the one window. In the time Sam and Dean had been talking, the sun had risen noticeably. The eastern sky was now streaked with pink and orange, and the bare slopes of Mount Carmel reflected a rosy hue. Dean wasn’t exactly the type to stare off into the dawn; if he was seeing the sunrise, he had probably been awake for all of the preceding night, and then he wanted as little light as possible, but he had to admit this was the most intense sky he had ever seen. Cas, looking at Dean’s expression in profile, could only assume it was something special; to him the colors were washed-out, the shapes of the clouds blurry and indistinct, and even when he looked at Dean, it was as though there was a veil between the angel and the man. “It is beautiful,” he said.

On the rug, Sam was no longer looking at the pages of dense text, but was instead running his finger down a single-column list, checking off items against a small pile of paraphernalia on the edge of the rug. The Ritual seemed light on equipment, which was great as far as Dean was concerned. The whole thing was complicated enough without having to lug a suitcase full of tallow candles and incense censers across two continents.

“Crap!” Sam swore suddenly and with enough violence that both Dean and Cas startled slightly. “I forgot to pick up unleavened bread with the other ritual components last night.”

“That’s not much of a problem.” Dean couldn’t see what Sam was so upset about. “We’ll pick some up as soon as the stores open.”

“Yeah, except,” Sam was now double-checking the other components with a preoccupied frown. “We’re not allowed to speak to anyone except other participants in the ritual. See, here,” Sam picked up the first of several pages covered in his untidy handwriting. “‘Those who would ascend the Mountain of the Lord shall, in keeping with their purification, break their fast with naught but unrisen bread and clear water. They shall guard themselves in silence, communing not with those still of the world.’ So I have to find a bakery in city where I have no idea where anything is, where I have no wi-fi and where I can’t even read the signs- all without talking to anybody.” Sam shook his head in disgust. “I don’t know how I’m going to make this work.”

“Do we have to go on the prisoner’s diet?” Dean asked, reluctant to be tripped up so close to their goal, but also uncertain if he wanted to screw with a ritual they were putting so much on.

“Yeah,” Sam said, touching a line of text about halfway down the second page. “It’s part of the purification, and if you don’t do that, it signals to the facet that you aren’t serious about the Ritual, so it won’t… unfold. I think that’s what it means. That part was pretty dense.”

“We can try again tomorrow,” Dean said, but his words sounded hollow even to himself. They were pushing up against the one-month limit, and Castiel was growing noticeably weaker with each passing day. The thought of delaying even twenty-four hours made his throat tighten.

Sam looked up at him, and the expression in his eyes was one that, in the past, only Dean had been responsible for.

There was a knock at the door. Cas tilted his head in apparent confusion, Dean reached instinctively for a gun that wasn’t there, but Sam stood up and stepped towards the door. His eyes widened as he opened it.

The innkeeper stood at the threshold, holding a silver tray covered with flat sheets of bread, browned in places from the oven. Sam’s expression clearly communicated the words he could not say. The innkeeper handed Sam the tray, nodded and walked back toward the stairs.

Sam stared after him for close to a minute before he recovered himself enough to close the door.

  


The sky was clear and blue by the time they arrived at the base of Mount Carmel, though the sun had not yet passed the mountain’s peak.

Cas seemed to have spent his strength on the short trip over. His head hung, and his arms lay on the armrests of his chair, fingers slightly curled. Sam looked at him in concern, but Dean surprised him by kneeling down next to the wheelchair. “Hey, Cas,” he said softly. “Cas. Look up. We’re there.”

Cas slowly raised his head, looking first at Dean, then at the craggy base of the mountain. Sam, looking at the dusty rocks and withered scrub, remembered what Castiel had said about angels being able to sense the divine, and thought perhaps he could see something he couldn’t.

Sam swung his backpack off of his shoulders and fished a few items out of it. “Ready?” he asked, unable to mask the tension in his voice.

“Just a second.” Dean indicated the trail which, though well maintained, was uneven and rocky. “We forgot to pack the ATV.”

Sam’s face fell. Of course the trail wasn’t wheelchair accessible, and he was an idiot for not thinking about it sooner. Still, though, Dean’s frequent assertions that the universe actively conspired against them now resonated with him on a fundamental level. Sam expected to hear another of these proclamations now; Dean had been stubbornly optimistic in his efforts to break the curse, but enough stumbling blocks would eventually exhaust even his fixed determination. When he didn’t hear a tirade of invective, Sam turned around, afraid that this blow had been too much for Dean, and he would see his brother dissolved in silent tears.

Instead, Dean was kneeling on the ground before Cas’s wheelchair, his back to the angel.

“You still got it in you to hold on?” he asked.

Cas nodded, apparently oblivious to the fact that Dean couldn’t see, and reached out his thin arms, wrapping them around Dean’s neck. Sam was shocked to see how slender the wrists protruding from the sleeves of the white shirt they had dressed Castiel in for the Ritual were. Jimmy Novak’s body had never exactly been beefy, but since Cas had taken ownership of it and Heaven had started sucking it dry, it had wilted down to almost nothing. Dean slid his hands under Castiel’s legs, supporting them just above the knee, and stood, lifting the angel easily.

“I’ll take the backpack” was all Sam said.

Stepping to the head of the trail, ignoring the curious glances of a few passing tourists, Sam removed a small beaten copper plate from his backpack and filled it with a mixture of dried herbs. He had picked up the herbs last night after they had found the inn, not having wanted to explain to some overzealous TSA agent that he was not, in fact, smuggling pot. Sam lit the dried leaves with a match (another of last night’s acquisitions, and it always felt weird performing centuries old rituals with modern matches and lighters). Letting the plume of fragrant smoke billow upwards, he lifted the copper plate and spoke the ancient words that begged the fragment of God to hear them, acknowledge them, notice their presence. He paused. The spicy scent of the herbs surrounded him, and all the hope and faith he’d ever felt in his life seemed ready to burst forth from his chest.

Nothing happened. Behind him, Dean shuffled his feet uncomfortably. Slowly, reverently, Sam lowered the burning plate until it was level with the middle of his chest. They had a long way to go.

  


They made a strange procession, Sam knew. A man carrying a holy water sprinkler and a dish of leaves slowly burning to ash, and a man carrying another man, clad all in white and the lightest of colors, on his back. He didn’t blame the other hikers for staring.

But the stares didn’t bother him, either.

Sometimes, when they performed rituals, it was obvious that they were working; the earth groaned and thunder rolled in response. Now, as they made their way slowly up the mountain, pausing every half mile or so to sprinkle holy water on the dry ground or recite prayers that Sam struggled to pronounce, the only sign that something might be happening was the small flame of hope Sam felt burning in his heart. And that could mean nothing, he knew, nothing more than that he was feeling what he wanted to feel. His faltering translation of the Coptic lines resonated with him in a way few other things had: _Oh God, we have turned away from You in the time of our jubilation. Now, in our sorrow, we return to You, begging that even a shadow of Your infinite Being grace us with Your forgiveness and mercy_. But just because something was beautiful didn’t mean it was true. Sam’s mind flashed to the perfect image of Jess Lucifer had used to lull him into a sense of security all those months ago when he first entered his dreams. Utterly beautiful, yet utterly false and thoroughly rotten.

Maybe Dean felt the same doubts, too, because he called to Sam: “Your notes say anything about when the fireworks start?”

“Sorry, no,” Sam said.

The forcible optimism that had carried Dean through since Massachusetts didn’t seem ready to quit yet, though, because he said “I bet no one will miss it when they do,” and Sam could almost find his confidence believable.

The sun climbed higher, and the coolness of the morning evaporated. Sam’s pack grew heavy, and the heat it trapped against his back became uncomfortable. It had to be worse for Dean. Cas was far heavier, and much warmer, than the supply of water bottles Sam was carrying.

“We can take a break any time either of you guys want to,” Sam called.

“I’m good,” Dean said.

“Cas? How about you?” Sam asked.

Sam couldn’t hear Cas’s answer and, staring ahead as he marched, couldn’t see him nod, chin pressing into Dean’s shoulder. “He’s good, too,” Dean said.

The crowd of tourists was thinning out now, though whether that was due to the increasing heat or their increasing height upon the mountain, Sam couldn’t say. If it was due their altitude, he had to conclude most people simply didn’t want to come up this far, because they weren’t setting a very fast pace, a fact which Dean was quick to point out when they encountered a nun on the trail.

“She’s passing us! Oh man, we’re getting beat by a _nun_ ,” he yelled to Sam.

Sam, once again regretting that the Ritual prohibited them from speaking to people outside of their little circle, smiled apologetically to the nun, who continued picking her way up the trail, clutching a fistful of grey skirt in each hand. A normal person, Sam thought ruefully, might consider carrying a grown man a valid reason to set a slower pace, but then, it had been a long time since anyone called Dean normal.

The mountain really was beautiful, in a harsh kind of way. It reminded Sam of Southern California, though he hadn’t spent much time there. One spring break while he was at Stanford, his friends, led by the party-hearty Brady, had decided to take a road trip to Tijuana. Sam had ridden down with them, taking more than his share of turns behind the wheel. The long drive had brought back something familiar and, to his surprise, not altogether unpleasant. But he had gotten out just before the border, pleading a lack of proper ID. “Seriously?” Brady had demanded. “Then why’d you come all this way?” _Because I wanted to fit in with something normal. Because I wanted to belong_ , the Sam in the present answered the echo in his past. But the other Sam, standing on the side of the road in a cloud of dust, just shrugged, unwilling to admit that he was afraid to find out what agencies already had his name and face on record.

To his surprise, Jess had gotten out of the car, too. They’d been seeing each other for a while, but nothing serious, hardly official. From the expression on Brady’s face, he must have been as shocked as Sam was, but Jess answered his whining protests of “What the hell? What the hell?” by explaining she had no interest in spending an entire week getting wasted; she’d had quite enough of that the Friday after finals week. She and Sam had spent the week together, staying in a motel that Jess said was kind of crappy, but Sam privately thought felt a bit like home, and spending their days hiking and exploring the small towns close to the border. It was, looking back on it, one of the best weeks of his life. _Jess, I’m sorry you ever met me._

  


“Hey, earth to Captain Picard!” Dean yelled from behind him. “You gonna stop spacing out and start walking?”

“Sorry.” Sam realized Dean had caught up with him and was practically stepping on his heels. “Picard? Seriously?”

There was a pause that indicated Dean was thinking about this, then: “Yeah, you’ve got more hair. So maybe, uh, Worf?”

Sam decided dignified silence was his best answer. But soon, the seemingly never-ending stream of wisecracks dried up, and the three ascended Mount Carmel in silence broken only by the Coptic prayers that Sam doubted more each time he recited them.

A few yards behind his brother, Dean set each footstep carefully. He didn’t want to stumble and jostle Castiel; it might cause the angel pain. Castiel did seem to grow heavier as time went on, though whether that was because Dean was tiring, as Sam implied with what seemed to be growing frequency, or because Castiel was less able to support his own weight, he wasn’t sure. He suspected the latter. He could feel Cas’s body sagging against his, the angel’s cheek pressed against his shoulder. He didn’t mind.

It was when Cas’s grip around his upper chest began slackening that he called for a halt.

“There’s a sort of nook up ahead. It looks shady. Do you think you can make it that far?” Sam asked.

Dean didn’t take offense. They both knew that he would never call for a break for himself.

They reached the little nook. It was a small outcropping that hung over a roughly flat shelf of rock, making a passable bench that would be shaded for all except a few hours a day.

“Cas’s coat is in the bottom of your backpack. You could lay it out for him,” Dean said.

Sam had wondered why the pack felt about five pounds heavier than he thought it should, but when he saw Castiel, he bit back the comments that had occurred to him. Castiel was resting his head against Dean’s left shoulder, and his face was very white, as though the sun had not touched him at all. Sam retrieved the trench coat, spreading it flat on the rocky shelf.

Dean gently eased Cas down onto the improvised cushion, offering him a bottle of water, trying to arrange him onto a comfortable position. Sam was struck by a sudden memory of waking up on a blood-stained mattress, cold and confused, in South Dakota. He turned away.

He wasn’t aware of Dean standing beside him until he spoke.

“Do you think we’re doing this right?”

Hearing Dean, Dean who had stubbornly pinned all of his hopes on this Ritual, expressing doubt in it was like a death knell for Sam’s flickering hopes. Anything he had felt was just the product of an overactive imagination. But he followed his brother’s gaze to the thin angel lying on the crumpled coat, his skin almost as pale as the white shirt mandated by the Ritual for ceremony or sacrifice, and found himself unable to give voice to his inner sense of dejection.

“We’ve done everything the instructions said. We’ve got all the equipment, we’ve filled all the fundamental roles. Priest-” Sam indicated himself. It was a role he felt singularly unqualified for, but Dean wasn’t able to read Coptic, and Cas was already assigned to “-Petitioner, and-” he pointed to Dean “Processor.”

Dean snorted. “You mean Packmule.”

Sam inferred from his brother’s derisive comment that he’d succeeded in reassuring him.

But neither of them mentioned the possibility of attempting the Ritual again tomorrow. They both knew: it was this or nothing.

  


Dean picked up Castiel, Sam folded the coat, and they continued climbing. The sun reached its zenith and they still were not at the top of the mountain.

“Man,” Dean complained, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief, “it’s sure bigger than it looks from the base.”

“I thought you knew,” Castiel said, clearly puzzled. Sam turned around to see he had tilted his head to the side, a gesture that looked truly absurd given that he was clinging to Dean’s back koala-like. “We ceased to ascend the physical mountain long ago. We are now climbing the spiritual mountain.”

“Son of a bitch!” Dean spat.

It was a good sign; at least something was happening, but it was hard to blame him for his frustration.

“You should not profane a place such as this with foul language,” Castiel said reproachfully.

It must have been a mountain of miracles, because Dean actually shut up.

Sam had ran out of ritual prayers a while back, and the silence they now ascended in was not so much one of reverence and hope as one of tension and desperation. 

When Sam broke it, it was not so much deliberately as out of genuine interest, although he had desperately wanted a reprieve from the sense of strain that pervaded their group.

“That tree,” he asked, indicating a plant about twice his height that sported a dangling cluster of orange fruits, “is that a date palm?”

Dean felt Cas lift his head from his shoulder, and Cas squinted in the direction Sam was pointing.

“Yes,” he said. “I believe it is a Judean date palm. Humans once revered them for the quality of their fruit.”

“They’re pretty much extinct, aren’t they?” Sam asked. “I think there’s only one in existence; it was germinated from a two thousand year old seed.”

Dean thought the twitch he felt might be Castiel shrugging. “Such things do not matter on the spiritual portion of the mountain.”

Sam stared at the tree for a moment more, running his hands over the spiny bark before Dean cleared his throat meaningfully. “Sam, we’re not here for the nature walk. Stop geeking out. How do you know that kind of stuff anyways?”

“It was in the news,” Sam said.

“Not our kind of news,” Dean grumbled.

“Doesn’t mean it wasn’t interesting.” Sam sounded mildly annoyed.

Dean grunted noncommittally, not so much because he had nothing to say, but because Cas had become heavy again. His head lolled on his shoulder, and his arms were loosening their hold around his chest.

“How much farther to the top?” Dean asked.

“I don’t know,” Castiel said, so softly that Dean wasn’t sure if Sam could hear. Nonetheless, he felt relieved to have gotten a response at all, and uncomfortable with his sense of relief.

The angle of the trail changed, flattening out. Dean, glancing off the trail to the west, saw Haifa laid out below, the buildings and streets indistinct more with a mist that could not have naturally sprung from the dry air. Maybe it was just the distance. He rolled his shoulder so Castiel’s head wouldn’t loll to the side in a position as uncomfortable as the one Dean had left him sprawled in the day that he fell. His legs were nearly limp now, too. Dean struggled to adjust them and maintain a good grip on the angel. He was supporting all of Castiel’s weight, and meager though it was, the day was hot and the climb had been long.

Yet it was not exertion that made his heart hammer in his throat when they reached the flat summit of Mount Carmel.

“What- what do we do now?” It took Dean two tries to get the first word out. His tongue felt thick and uncooperative, and his throat was tight. Maybe he’d swallowed more trail dust than he thought.

“Bear him to the center of the holy pinnacle. Place him there and let the priest call upon God for mercy, then retreat and let the will of God be done.” Sam spoke in a voice that was not his own, flat and distant, and Dean knew he was reciting.

“Give me his coat.” Dean spoke suddenly, without really understanding why. It was only instinct, but sometimes instinct was everything in matters of magic and ritual.

“But the Ritual-” The documents had insisted that the Petitioner be dressed in clothes symbolizing purity and humility, clothes of the lightest colors and simplest fabrics. Sam had opted to buy Cas a white cotton dress shirt and a pair of khaki slacks.

“He’s not him without it.”

Sam fished the coat out of the back pack. Dean reached out to take it, and one of Cas’s legs fell limply by his side. Dean started forward toward the center of the flat area at the peak of the mountain.

The eastern side of the peak rose slightly higher than the others. It offered almost no shade at this time of day, but Sam retreated towards it anyways. The role Sam had taken in the Ritual, that of Priest, was fundamental, but his work was done. It was all up to who- or what- ever was at the top of the mountain- if there was anything. Besides, it felt intrusive to encroach on Dean and Castiel right now. Cas was _his_ angel in a way he’d never really be Sam’s. He was the one who’d gripped him tight and raised him from Perdition.

Sam watched from the shelter of the rock face- almost a cliff, except it rose no more than fifteen feet- as Dean carried Cas to a dusty palm trunk that lay on its side in the dry dirt. A thin layer of moisture coated the surface of Sam’s sheltering rock. It seemed to seep out of the rock itself, and gradually trickled down, becoming a small stream that formed a pool without outlet in the center of the plateau. A smattering of green plants grew around the water source, but they seemed to drink up the moisture within a few yards, and the rest of the summit seemed as dry as the trail leading up to it. The palm could have lain there for centuries, preserved by the dry climate.

Dean gently laid Cas down, bracing his back against the palm, and carefully tugged his coat on. Cas was as limp as a rag doll and offered neither help nor resistance. Dean lifted Castiel again, this time not bothering to try to carry him on his back, but merely carrying him in his arms. The cadence of his steps as he approached the central pool called to mind the deliberate, heavy rhythm of the prayers Sam had chanted earlier. Dean hesitated beside the pool, clearly sensing that it was in the middle of the peak, and uncertain what he should do. Finally, he placed Castiel beside the water, near some rushes. He knelt down beside him. He seemed frozen for a moment, then gave a forced smile that became both much more genuine and much sadder as he reached out and stroked Castiel’s hand.

Sam couldn’t hear the words he said, but he could read lips well enough to get the gist of his brother’s message: _What do we do now?_

Sam shook his head and beckoned his brother to him. _Nothing. Come here. All we can do is wait._

With a last, reluctant glance at Castiel, Dean retreated toward his brother. Arms crossed, he leaned back against the rock wall, disregarding the damp that was seeping through his shirt.

They waited. Dean kept his gaze locked on Cas, but Sam found himself looking between his brother and the angel. He knew his lack of focus was due to his increasing anxiety, but he couldn’t stop that anymore than he could slow the frantic pace of his thoughts. It felt wrong, just standing here, waiting for…they were too far away to see any flicker of motion from Castiel …there was very little wood, and the ground was so hard and dry...

Dean started to step forward, but Sam grabbed his arm, holding him back. “Can’t you feel it?” he mouthed, not even whispering. And maybe, Dean could. Or maybe it was his last, desperate hope that trembled, bird-like, beneath his skin.

Cas lay in a patch of light. It wasn’t the same harsh, direct sun that blazed down on every exposed patch of ground. The tall reeds that shaded the edge of the pool diffused it so it was softer, and golden. It looked almost like a palpable thing. Dean imagined that it would feel warm and soft if he reached into it.

While the ordinary light made him squint and sent spots dancing in front of his eyes if he looked at any one point too long, this light seemed to almost magnify. Even from this distance, he could see Castiel’s eyelashes, dark against his pale skin. He looked peaceful. He was very still.

Dean’s heart lurched. He pulled his arm out of Sam’s grip and stepped toward the pool, then froze.

Castiel’s eyes opened.

He easily pushed himself to a sitting position, then stood without apparent effort. The cloud of golden light still hung around him.

Dean stood still, frozen in place. He was vaguely aware of his mouth hanging open, dimly conscious of Sam standing beside him. “It worked,” he said uncertainly, as though he expected to, at any moment, wake up from this strange dream.

Castiel approached him, stepping around the pond with slow, dignified steps. But his steps were steady, and his blue eyes shone with an inner light more intense than the glow that still wreathed him. Dean wondered if it were really there, or if it was how he normally looked and he was only now noticing it, or maybe if the strange rising, expanding feeling in the center of his chest was somehow interfering with his vision.

“God exists.” Castiel’s voice was deep and rich, no tremor of fear or weakness. “God exists, and He is merciful. He has restored me here, given back more than I lost in falling. I have seen but one aspect of His infinite Being, and there is no rejection of His creation there.”

He stood beside the pool, hands outstretched toward Sam and Dean as though inviting them into his home.

Dean was the first to find his voice. “You’ve… you’ve got your mojo back?” Ok, not the most eloquent thing he’d ever said, but it felt like the world had spent the last month upside down, and it had just now righted itself, and the blood hadn’t yet come back to his head.

Castiel nodded, a sort of half smile playing on his lips, and God, but Dean had forgotten the power and dignity that suffused his every movement. “More than ever before.”

“So you can zap us back to the US?” Dean asked eagerly.

Sam had apparently regained his composure, because Dean heard him scoff loudly.

“I can do so. But,” Castiel said solemnly, “first, I would like to descend the mountain without the aid of any angelic gifts.”

Sam and Dean agreed. It seemed right. The climb down was long, but nowhere near as long as the ascent. Each step felt like a silent thanks to the power that had reached out to them.

Each of Castiel’s steps looked like a benediction.

  


At the bottom of the mountain, Castiel raised both index fingers, ready to touch both Winchesters’ foreheads and transport them back to America.

“Wait!” Sam said.

Dean frowned at him, seized by a sudden irrational fear that Sam was about to announce that they really ought to fly back the normal way.

“We should go back to the inn first. The innkeeper really did a lot for us.” _And I never even asked his name_ , Sam realized.

“And some of our belongings are still there,” Castiel agreed.

  


Several hours later, they were exhausted and sweaty, and they still hadn’t found the inn.

“But it was right here,” Sam insisted, gesturing forcefully at the tiny gap between two buildings. “It was right _here_.” 

Dean raised an eyebrow. “Sure the heat’s not getting to you, Sammy? There’s no way anyone could fit a building in there.”

Sam shook his head. “No, this building was on the left-” He indicated a nondescript whitewashed structure “-and that one was on the right.” He pointed at a squat brick structure with crumbling mortar. “I don’t get it. I swear we’re in the right place.”

“You can Mapquest it when we get back,” Dean said.

When Sam opened his mouth to protest, he continued: “It’s not like we left anything important there anyways- just some clothes and a couple of toothbrushes.” Dean reached out, clapping Castiel on the shoulder. “C’mon, Cas. Let’s go home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for: swearing, disability-related issues and mentions of death.

**Author's Note:**

> When there's a really good multi-chapter fic that just sort of fizzles out in the middle, it's very disappointing. So I've made sure that, if anyone finds Over the Mountain enjoyable, this won't happen to them. I don't publish any multi-chapter work until the entire thing has been written and beta'd, and I will stick to the update schedule barring events on par with a county-wide internet outage.  
> Supernatural, and none of the other original works referenced within this story, belong to me. And thank you, Osito, for beta'ing!  
> Content warnings for Chapter One: Drifting Down: Fainting, canon-typical violence, mentions of death, profanity, emotional outbursts, alcohol, alcoholism, mentions of car crashes and drunk driving, and nightmares.


End file.
